


After The War

by grilledcheesing



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-07 17:44:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12237642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grilledcheesing/pseuds/grilledcheesing
Summary: Peter survives the war against Thanos that kills all of his teammates, and returns to an earth laid to waste to discover Tony has left him … everything.And he means everything. The company, the relief efforts, and — most importantly — the infant son Tony never knew he had.As Peter pushes through a grief that threatens to swallow him whole, takes the burden of rebuilding the planet on his shoulders, and raises Tony’s son, the last thing he expects is for Tony himself to show up on his doorstep five years later as if no time has passed at all.





	1. Chapter 1

Peter should have known better than to have expected that anyone he loved would have survived the war.

 

Peter should have held May a little tighter on the way out the door, should have committed the moment to some more sacred part of his memory. Should have told her to move inland, away from the city, away from coastlines. Should have said goodbye to Ned and MJ in person, and told them how much they meant to him, how much they always would.

 

But before it was a war it was an adventure. It was a harried, heartfelt goodbye to his aunt and a brand new tricked out suit in his duffel bag and a string of spaceship and star emojis in the group chat.

 

It was goodbye, but it wasn’t supposed to be _goodbye_. Now, standing in the ruins of what used to be his apartment complex, on what used to be his street, in a city left to survivors and scavengers with nowhere else to go, he knows that no “goodbye” could ever have cut it.

 

He can’t reach anybody by phone. They don’t have that kind of technological capability anymore; in the wake of the mass destruction, the planet’s essentially been knocked back 100 years. He tells himself (or tries to, at least) that they defended the earth the best they could. If it weren’t for them, _nobody_ would be here. But that does nothing to lessen the grave weight of the literal billions of deaths.

 

Seventy percent of the earth’s population — gone.

 

And Peter still here.

 

Peter still here, when nobody else is. Peter still here, because Big Peter found him in the rubble in the aftermath, surrounded by the corpses of what were once his fellow Avengers — for those few brief, impossible weeks when he was _one of them_ , counting himself among _legends_ — and dragged his ass home.

 

But home is gone.

 

“Stick with us,” Big Peter had told him, a few minutes after they landed in what was essentially a wasteland. He’d borderline begged him. “You can’t be serious about staying.”

 

Peter blinked back at the man who saved him. “I have to be here,” he told him.

 

“There _is_ no here.”

 

The grief felt separate from him, like something that could weigh him down without touching him; a shadow overhead, pulsing and alive, following his every step.

 

It focused him. It gave him a grim kind of strength.

 

“But there will be,” Peter said. “We’re going to rebuild. Start again.” His throat was thick. “I’ll make sure of it.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

May is dead. Died in the first round of fighting, when the army landed on New York’s soil and just about leveled everything within a ten mile radius of Manhattan. Peter assumes Ned and MJ and everyone else he knows are gone, too.

 

He can’t start here. He doesn’t have any resources. He finds a car that looks somewhat salvageable, jumps it, and drives the empty roads upstate.

 

The compound looks virtually untouched, suspended in time. It is then that, for the first time, Peter is slammed with a grief so intense that he feels dizzy with it. Like he might just open the car door and throw up what little food he has in him on the lawn. How ridiculous that six months ago he was bounding up in this building like it was playland. Bothering Tony in his lab. Training with Natasha. Thinking about his college apps and prom and his painfully swelling crush on MJ.

 

He squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to breathe. Then he gets out of the car.

 

FRIDAY lets him in.

 

“Miss Potts is waiting to receive you in her office.”

 

Peter flinches like he’s hearing a ghost. “Miss Potts?” he says. His voice sounds strange to him, echoed back in these old familiar walls. “She’s alive?”

 

FRIDAY doesn’t answer. For all Peter has been through, he doesn’t consider for a moment that it might be a trap; he runs.

 

He all but bursts through the open door of the office, and _there_. There she is. A person that Peter knows, a person who made him pancakes, a person who is breathing and existing and somehow — 

 

She turns in her chair, then, and Peter reels. She is ghastly pale and frighteningly small and … and there’s a baby in her arms.

 

“Peter,” she says, her voice hoarse. The relief in her eyes is palpable, almost painful to look at. “You’re ... “

 

“Tony’s dead,” Peter blurts. Jesus. He didn’t mean to say it like that. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. He can’t remember how he’s supposed to be, how he ever was.

 

But Pepper doesn’t react. She already knows. “I thought _all_ of you were dead.”

 

Peter’s throat tightens. “Well.”

 

“Just you, then?”

 

Peter’s eyes fall to the floor, but not fast enough to brace himself. It’s been weeks since the final battle, but in some ways it’s still happening. In some ways it always will be. He doubts if there will ever be a moment, for as long as he lives, that he won’t see the light dying in the eyes of his heroes. The eyes of his _friends_.

 

His voice is a whisper. “Just me.”

 

Pepper nods. “I’m sorry, Pete.”

 

Peter shakes his head. “No,” he says. “ _I’m_ the one who’s …”

 

 _Sorry_ doesn’t even begin to cut it. Peter shouldn’t be the one standing here. Of all of them, he should have been the last on the priority list for survival. He’s just a stupid kid with no clout, no resources, no options.

 

It’s why he’s here. First because he had no place else to go. And second, because if there is anyone left in the world who knows how to fix what’s left in it, then they’re here.

 

“Peter … I don’t have much time,” says Pepper. She extends her arms out weakly, and Peter realizes that she means for him to take the sleeping bundle of baby from her. He freezes for a moment, staring at her, staring at _it_.

 

“His name is James,” says Pepper. “He’s my son. Tony’s son.”

 

Another wave of nausea so intense that it almost cripples him. “Tony’s _son?_ ” he manages. Tony, who protected him time and time again; who tried to become a human shield when he couldn’t do anything else; who would certainly not have been so reckless with his life if he had known what was waiting for him at home.

 

“Take him, please,” says Pepper.

 

Peter almost shakes his head. But her eyes are pleading, her arms are quaking. He steps forward, somehow understanding the irreversible course it is setting him on as it happens. Almost _feeling_ the way the universe seems to peel some part of itself back, pushing him into yet another reality he could never have anticipated.

 

Pepper settles the baby into Peter’s awkward, stilted arms. The baby burrows into him forgivingly, eyes still closed, blissfully unaware of the world shifting under Peter’s feet. .

 

“It probably doesn’t surprise you to know that Tony left the company to you,” says Pepper. “That is, in the event that the two of us …”

 

Peter doesn’t want to hear this. “Pepper, we’ll get you help. I have a car — ”

 

She cuts him off with one quick shake of her head. “It’s radiation poisoning, Pete. Irreversible. I’m going to die. Soon.”

 

He wishes some part of his heart had hardened by now. Isn’t that what he deserves? If this is going to keep happening, if he’s going to keep losing _everyone_ , shouldn’t it hurt a little less when it happens one more countless time?

 

But his eyes are burning with tears, his chest aching. “No,” he says, feeling stupid, feeling like the child he was just a few months before.

 

“Peter, I need you to listen to me.”

 

His heart is hammering in his ears, his eyes burning. The baby is wriggling in his arms, its weight unfamiliar and warm and oddly comforting, like some sort of tether to the earth — some kind of tether to _Tony_ , to the world that was before — that Peter never thought that he’d have again.

 

“Stark Industries is yours and yours alone. I’ve left the beginnings of plans for — for ways we can help. For ways we can fix this. But after that … I’m afraid it’s all going to be on you.”

 

Peter follows her eyes to the stack of papers in front of her, all handwritten. He doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, only knows that there was never a choice.

 

“Okay.”

 

“And Peter,” says Pepper, and only then do her eyes start to stream, does her frail body start to shake. “I need you to take care of James.”

 

Peter stops breathing in that moment, staring at her, stricken.

 

“You’re the only one that I trust,” she says, her voice breaking. “The only one Tony would have trusted.”

 

 _I’m sixteen_ , says some unhelpful reflex in the back of his brain. The baby squirms again, this living, breathing, pudgy little thing that doesn’t know its whole tiny world is being upended right now. That his whole fate is being put into the hands of someone who, in some other, better world, would be in the middle of a calculus exam right now, wondering what excuse for food Midtown High is serving today for hot lunch.

 

“Please, Peter,” Pepper is asking him. “The two of you are all I have. I want you … I need you to stick together.”

 

And Peter almost loses it at this. That she is putting Peter on the same level as her own flesh and blood. That she sees him as every bit a son as the one Peter is holding in his arms.

 

He should be used to this by now. He’s lost two mothers already. Too many fathers to count.

 

“Of course,” says Peter. Before she can ask it — or maybe she never was going to ask it, because she already knows — the words are tearing through his throat: “I _promise_.”

 

Pepper closes her eyes and smiles so earnestly that for a moment Peter can see her the way she was when he left — radiant, sharp, effervescent. He pulls James closer to his chest, asks her if there’s anything he can get her, anything he can do, and she says yes. She tells him to grab her one of the bottles of water from the kitchen. She murmurs a thank you, and Peter shifts the baby in his arms, some tender part of his heart he’d forgotten about cinching in his chest. By the time he comes back with the water bottle, Pepper’s eyes are closed, her body slack in the seat. By the time he comes back, Pepper is dead.

 

* * *

 

The first week is terrifying. Peter can’t even remember ever _holding_ a baby before, and James can’t be any more than a few months old. Pepper left a detailed record for taking care of him, but it doesn’t account for the beats in between, the terrifying moments when the baby screams or hiccups weirdly and nothing Peter says or does will do anything to calm him down.

 

Peter doesn’t think he sets the baby down for the whole first month for more than a few minutes at a time — he’s terrified something will happen to him. He’s terrified that he’ll lose someone else. He’s terrified that even in death, he’ll let Tony down.

 

But it’s startling, how quickly the baby goes from being _Tony’s baby_ to being _James_. From being _James_ to being the strange epicenter of Peter’s otherwise uncertain, rocky, unbearable world.

 

Peter doesn’t sleep much for those first few weeks, getting his bearings. By some miracle some of the tech at the compound is still working on reserve battery, enough that Peter can get somewhat of a bird’s eye view on how catastrophic the damage has been, where the most vulnerable areas are, and some idea of where he should start a grand master plan that is so much bigger than him it’s too scary to fathom.

 

In those moments, when it all seems to swallow him, there is something mercifully grounding in the little things — in the feedings, the diaper changes, the board book reading, the regular wakeup calls in the middle of the night. Things Peter can manage; things Peter can fix.

 

“I’m always gonna be here,” he tells a slumbering James fiercely, on one of those first nights. He’s sleep-deprived and overly emotional and feeling the bite of his grief in the darkness, but they only make his resolve more resolute than ever: “I will never, _ever_ leave you alone.”

 

And he means it.

 

He lets the world think Spider-Man is dead. There isn’t even a moment of doubt; the world doesn’t need Spider-Man. The world needs … the world needs Tony Stark. But they can’t have that, so they get Peter Parker instead.

 

Granted, nobody knows who he is, and at first it doesn’t matter. There’s nobody to question him. He has the authority to put Tony’s resources to good use and a plan, and that’s more than any of their scattered, fallen government agencies can do right then.

 

So Peter sets out at sixteen, pledging his life to two causes and two causes alone: James, and saving the world.

 

He starts with the plan Pepper started mapping for him before her death: allocating resources in across the most devastated regions, temporary relief that will save lives but won’t stabilize them. Once that preliminary phase is executed, Peter takes James down to Washington, D.C. and tirelessly vets and assembles a team, training them to use the Iron Man suits that Tony left behind to assist in the reconstruction of major cities. Peter talks to representatives available from every city that suffered the most brutal ends of the war, assesses their needs, and unintentionally becomes the leader of a global relief effort with an infant strapped to his chest the entire time.

 

Once the first round of relief plans gets set into motion, Peter travels to the cities himself, he and James a two person mission on a tour through the wrecked coasts, the battered midwest, the broken states in between. He only stays domestic because of James, but he has eyes on every other city, eyes everywhere that he possibly can. And eyes always, always, always on one James Stark Potts Parker.

 

Everyone assumes he is Peter’s son, and Peter does nothing to correct them. He figures it’s safer that way. At some point, he reasons, someone will do the math and figure out he’s not even of age; if that happens, at least he’ll be able to have legal claim on James if he says he’s his biological son.

 

And in every regard other than that, James is. He can’t even explain it; how in the storm of his despair, there is this eye, this one good, calm, untainted thing that makes it all worth enduring. Peter didn’t even know it was possible to love someone this much. He thinks it might have scared him if he had. In truth, there isn’t a single person on earth Peter wouldn’t lay his life down for — a quality that Tony constantly harped on, lectured on, and eventually screamed at him for — but for James, he will do more than that.

 

For James, he will rebuild the whole goddamn human race.

 

And it’s the promise of that world that presses Peter forward. It’s the promise of a normal life for James that wakes Peter up in the morning, that fuels the long, impossible days working through wreckage and enduring a hundred thousand heartbreaks from strangers in their midst, that pushes Peter through the exhaustion and the grief and the literal wounds from the war that, despite his abilities, refuse to fully heal — the ache in one of his legs that gets worse by the day; the pain in his chest that gets more acute every time he strains himself; the long scar from Thanos himself that winds from the top of his forehead, interrupted by his left eye, and courses through his cheek all the way down to his chin.

 

 _Peter Parker: Meet The Boy Who’s Saving The World_ , reads the headline on the front page of the New York Times, the first day they manage to publish again.

 

Peter crumples it in his hand. The image accompanying it is a picture of him directing relief workers in the wreckage of Boston, with James in plain view strapped to his chest.

 

The world explodes a little bit after that. People want interviews. At a few wreckage sites, he’s accosted in the streets. They want to know how old he is, who James’s mother is, how he survived as a New Yorker during the attacks.

 

Peter goes back to D.C. People are getting too damn close for comfort.

 

“I’m so sorry, James,” he says, sitting with on a chair in a flimsy room in a freshly constructed building, the whole city still stale with the smell of death. What he means to say, of course, is the thought that has been on a constant loop since Peter woke up in the Guardians’ ship: _I’m so sorry, Tony_.

 

He presses a brief kiss into James’s forehead as the baby’s eyelids sink closed and his weight gets warmer on Peter’s chest. Peter waits until he’s certain he’s asleep to put him in the little crib, then flips open his laptop and settles into another long night of emails, supply allocations, strategizing, and phone calls.

 

Sometime around five in the morning, there’s a knock at the door.

 

Peter freezes. The hairs on the back of his neck don’t prickle, but that doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s been so long since he’s used his abilities for anything other than construction work that he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d faded away altogether. There’s enough spotlight on him now as plain old Peter Parker that he knows he could never risk it by exposing himself as the former Spider-Man, too. Not with James’s safety on the line.

 

“Peter, I swear to fucking _god_. If that’s you in there, you’d better open the door.”

 

Peter is certain in that moment that he is hallucinating. It wouldn’t be a stretch; he has dreams now, vivid, awful, excruciating dreams about the people he lost. He dreams about picking apart old ‘90s tech with Ned. He dreams about the books he borrowed from Michelle, with her tidy, thoughtful notes scrawled in the margins. On the worst nights, he dreams that he wakes up in his old apartment in Queens, May peering down at him with that loving kind of concern, letting him know that he’s late for school; dreams that all of this was just a nightmare, a few minutes worth of elaborate stress dreams and nothing more.

 

But then he wakes up to the sound of James’s whimpers, or fighting in the streets, or a construction crew outside his window, and just like that, it’s gone.

 

“Peter?”

 

James starts to fuss then, and Peter pulls himself out of his haze and goes to him. There’s another knock on the door.

 

“Peter. _Peter_.”

 

He holds James close to his chest, bracing himself as he opens the door. He is expecting his eyes to open, expecting that he fell asleep over his laptop and this will be the end of his dream. Instead he finds himself staring into the eyes of one ragged, exhausted, but _very much alive_ Michelle Jones.

 

“MJ,” he breathes.

 

He remembers the hardness in her eyes, the sharp sweep of their angles, the way he used to swell whenever she looked his way. They are the same eyes, but they aren’t. There is a depth in them, a fear, an openness he isn’t expecting; he is trapped in them for a moment, seeing some reflection of himself he’d forgotten, ripping open a wound he hadn’t even had enough time to heal.

 

And then her eyes are watery with tears she doesn’t shed, looking at him, then down at James, and back at him.

 

“I heard Spider-Man was dead,” she says.

 

Peter still can’t decide if she’s real or not. He eases James into the crook of one arm and lifts the other, putting a hand on MJ’s face, skimming her cheek with his fingers. Warm. Alive.

 

The tears start tracking down her face in an instant.

 

“And then,” she says, shaking his hand off of her cheek, “I hear all these rumors. These — these _reports_ , about someone named Peter, someone who took over Stark Industries. And I tell myself, _There’s no way. There’s no_ …”

 

“I thought you were dead, too,” says Peter.

 

“No _shit_ ,” she says, “because if there’d been one fucking _moment_ you knew I was alive and _didn’t_ try to find me, I’d have … I’d have …”

 

James starts to squirm in Peter’s arms, and they both blink away from themselves for a moment, their focus shifted.

 

“Can you come in?” Peter asks.

 

MJ doesn’t answer, because she’s already shutting the door behind her. James wakes up then, letting out a shrill whine, and MJ extends her arms out to take him.

 

“Wh-what? No, no, I’ve got him,” says Peter, who is still _reeling_. Because this can’t be happening. Good things don’t happen to him anymore, don’t happen to anybody. He is lucky enough to have James, when so many have nothing else; lucky enough to have someone to call _family_ at all.

 

This — this is a trick. One more thing the universe will taunt him with and rip away from him. He knows it. He’s sure of it. And then — 

 

And then MJ is sliding her arms under Peter’s, and easing James into her chest. Her warm skin grazes against his and the relief of it is so debilitating that Peter just about collapses right there.

 

“I have a — had a niece,” MJ explains, mistaking the disbelief on his face for something else. In that moment he can feel the rawness of her pain so viscerally that it might be his own; like there might not be any physical space or skin or bones between them, but just a shared, open, gaping wound of understanding.

 

The understanding of a person who survived, when too many others did not.

 

Peter finally finds enough air to say, “I missed you. I’ve missed you every day.”

 

She looks up with haunted eyes, like she might say something that breaks whatever fragile thread between them is keeping them both from falling apart. Instead, she says, “Peter, where the hell did you get this baby?”

 

So Peter tells her. He tells her everything — well, he tells her the parts that he can. The war itself is too fresh, too unbearable to think about. He has to push it somewhere else if he wants to exist in this world, if he wants to pull himself out of the selfishness of his own hatred for himself to properly take care of James.

 

But he tells her about Pepper and Tony, tells her about his plans to rebuild, tells her about James. And she, in turn, explains her own past year — how she left New York the day of the attack to visit her grandmother in Ohio, and was among the few survivors of the subsequent earthquake that leveled most of Cleveland. She, too, made her way to D.C., on hearsay that they were better off than New York, and has been on the ground helping with rehabilitation ever since.

 

“We must have just missed each other,” she figures out, as they trace the cities they’ve been helping reconstruct over the past few months.

 

They’re sitting on the edge of the bed now, James asleep in MJ’s arms, Peter so close to her that their shoulders and knees are touching. He relishes the feeling of it, but not in the old way — not in that thrilling, pubescent, rattled way, but in some profound and almost heart-wrenching way. He wants to put his hands on her face, on her shoulders; wants to listen to her breathe. _You’re here. You’re here. You’re here._

 

“Peter,” she says, cocking her head at him. “When’s the last time you slept?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“You look … terrible. Really, truly terrible.”

 

“I think the scar makes me look manly,” he says. It’s not even really a joke, but it’s the closest he’s come to one since he got back to Earth. He can’t decide whether he likes the feeling or not.

 

She reaches up and thumbs it, tracing the line so gently that Peter feels his throat tighten, feels his heart squeeze in his chest. It’s been so long, _so long_ since anyone has touched him, since anyone has cared. So long since he has felt any kind of connection between the person he used to be and whatever the hell he is now. At first his entire body wants to reject it, wants to avoid the flood of what comes with it, pulsing in his ribcage and aching in the unhealed injuries and pounding in the headache that never seems to go away.

 

“Peter,” says MJ quietly. “You’re limping. This scar never healed. What happened?”

 

He casts his gaze to the floor. “I don’t know,” he says, because it’s true. “My healing factor … it just didn’t work on whatever happened to me out there.”

 

He doesn’t say the rest because he doesn’t want to scare her, or maybe because he doesn’t want to admit it to himself: _In fact, it’s only getting worse._

 

She narrows her eyes at him. He’s never been able to hide anything from her for long.

 

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she says. “You’re going to let me take care of this tyke for a few hours, and you’re going to sleep.”

 

The fear that seizes his heart is so irrational that he hates himself for it. _It’s a trick_. She’s not real. She’s — she’s a bot, or another reality created by the mind stone, some test to see if he’ll let his guard down.

 

He won’t survive it, he thinks. If this isn’t real — if something happens to James —

 

A hand is on his shoulder. “Parker. You’re shaking. And you’re kinda freaking me out.”

 

He doesn’t mean to say it. He’s gone so long burying everything else, though, that he can’t help this one fear from slipping through the cracks: “I — I can’t. I can’t sleep. I don’t … “ _I don’t want you to be gone when I wake up._

 

MJ lowers the hand on his shoulder, pressing into his arm and squeezing, the gesture saying the words that are too absurd to say out loud: _I’m here. It’s me. We’re real._

 

“Listen, Peter. I don’t say this very often, because it’s bullshit most of the time,” she tells him. Then her eyes lock on his, with that new weight in them that stills and captivates him, and says, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

 

Later she’ll tell him that he slept for fifteen straight hours without so much as flinching; later she’ll mention in passing, without quite keeping the nervousness out of her voice, that she thought for a few times he might even be dead. But Peter only remembers waking up to the sight of MJ at his laptop, scrolling through his inbox, James propped on her shoulder with a curious fist bunching and un-bunching in her hair.

 

It takes her a moment to turn and see that he’s awake. If she notices that he’s staring like the sight of her is the most beautiful thing his eyes have ever seen, she doesn’t say anything about it.

 

“Okay,” she says, “I think I’m up to speed on your … ridiculously ambitious plan here.”

 

“You are?”

 

“I am,” she says, shutting the laptop, “and I’m in.”

 

Peter blinks. “You’re — you’re what?”

 

“I’m the Vice President of Stark Industries,” she informs him. “As of approximately six and a half hours ago.”

 

For the first time in months, Peter smiles. Not the kind of smile he smiles for James’s sake, when he’s telling stories or tucking him in or soothing some of his little baby whines, but an actual smile. It hurts. He doesn’t mind it.

 

MJ’s entire face goes red. “Yeah, yeah, I needed a job anyway, so. Unemployment rate is … y’know. Through the roof.”

 

“I love you,” Peter blurts.

 

She doesn’t even flinch. Just looks over at him and holds his gaze. He eases himself out of the bed, and for once he can ignore the ache in his leg, that pain in his chest, all the little things that plague him.

 

“I’ve loved you for a long time,” he says. The words are so easy and natural coming out of his mouth that it seems absurd to him that he was ever scared to say them. Absurd that he could even imagine wasting one more moment of not saying it ever again. “I should have told you when we were kids.”

 

They are kids, he realizes belatedly. He can still kind of feel it sometimes. In the very sixteen-year-old way his palms start to sweat and his heart starts to race. In the very sixteen-year-old way MJ’s mouth has come slightly unhinged, her eyes widening just slightly, some part of her face coming alive the way he is certain it hasn’t in over a year.

 

She looks away from him for a moment, only to gently ease James back down into his crib. She waits a beat, and when he doesn’t fuss, she turns around with a determination that almost scares him — scares him in that old familiar, impossible, _MJ_ kind of way — and all but slams her body into his, kissing him, _hard_.

 

“I love you too,” she tells him.

 

And the next kiss, the softer, fiercer, shorter kiss is less like a kiss and more like a promise, one that they both intend to keep: _I’m never letting you go._    



	2. Chapter 2

Tony knows something is wrong before he opens his eyes.

 

He isn’t in any pain. The room around him is entirely too bright. Either this is an extremely vivid fuck-all of another one of those dreams he sometimes has, those dreams where the war is over and they’re back on earth someplace with a beach and shit you can drink out of a pineapple and Pepper in a polka-dot bikini (he can’t help that his subconscious gets so specific), or he is one hundred percent not where he is supposed to be.

 

He opens his eyes to a sunny hospital room.

 

So, definitely option two.

 

At first he doesn’t trust it. Why should he? If the last few months have proved anything, it’s that there really _is_ no such thing as reality. Or rather, there are so many of them that it’s practically narcissistic to assume that theirs holds a shred of significance to any other. Tony and the others have been shoved in and out of enough bullshit during this melee with Thanos to prove it.

 

The others. Tony whips around, and feels a cold kind of dread coming over him; feels a sliver of a thought that feels uncomfortably like a memory.

 

It slams into him all at once: the final battle, or what must have been the final one. He remembers watching his teammates fall, watching the viewfinder of his suit report critical, irreversible damage. Remembers the unforgiving darkness of the stars. Remembers the lifeless eyes of Nat and Clint, the last gasp of Steve, the final twitches of Bruce’s body returning to its normal form, and Peter — 

 

Tony stops breathing altogether, pinching his eyes shut as if he can will the truth of it away, as if he can unsee the moment he watched the kid’s body plummet from the sky and land with a dull, sickening _thud_.

 

Peter is dead. The thought scrambles everything else, screaming between his ears, swelling in his chest: _Peter is dead._

 

Tony doesn’t want this, whatever this is — this sterile room, this painless world, this stupid unmistakably _earthen_ sunlight pouring in through the window. He needs to be back in those final moments, needs to do what he _swore_ , not just to May and to God and whatever other deity, but to _himself_ , that he would do. He needs to protect that bullheaded, ridiculous, self-sacrificing _kid_.

 

But even if Tony was granted all the time in the world, he knows Peter would never have let him put a stop to that.

 

“Mr. Stark,” comes the curt greeting from the doctor who walks into the room.

 

Tony pulls himself out of the bed with surprising ease, seeing that someone, mercifully, put him in white pants and a tank top while he was out.

 

“I’m going to need to know where the hell I am, a working phone, and a change of clothes, right now.”

 

The doctor looks unfazed. “You’re in a medical facility in Washington, D.C.,” she informs him. “You were delivered here a week ago by Stephen Strange. I’ve alerted him about the change in your conscious state, and he’s en route.”

 

“En route for what?” Tony snaps.

 

“To explain the situation.”

 

Tony doesn’t want an explanation. He wants the hell out of here. He wants — 

 

 _Breathe_. Fuck. _Breathe, you idiot_.

 

Something’s wrong. Okay, understatement of the century, but something _else_ is wrong.

 

Strange. If Strange is involved, the answer isn’t simple. If Strange is involved …

 

“Tell me how I got here,” Tony says through his teeth.

 

Maybe she isn’t supposed to tell him, but after a moment of hesitation, she does anyway. “Some kind of … portal,” she says, wincing, like she still doesn’t want to believe in the bizarreness of it. “Dr. Strange explained that he pulled you through it with him after Thanos was defeated.”

 

It is jarring, hearing the warlord’s name spoken from a civilian’s lips like it’s common knowledge.

 

And then the uneasy part of his brain that has been slowly, unconsciously picking up on cues pushes itself forward so brutally that Tony doesn’t want to acknowledge it. He’s in a hospital room, on _Earth_. The same planet that was supposedly in ruins; the same planet that was supposed to take decades, if not generations, to rebuild.

 

“What year is it?” he demands.

 

He hopes she will balk at him. He hopes she’ll scowl, or even look concerned, like it’s the deranged question of a paranoid, PTSD-riddled man.

 

Instead she says, without missing a beat, “I’m sorry. I hoped Dr. Strange would be here when you woke up.” She levels him with careful eyes, but doesn’t sugar coat the truth: “It’s 2023.”

 

* * *

 

 

Maybe Tony should have been easier on Cap when they first met, because this … this is nothing short of fucking insane.

 

From the moment he walks out of the hospital he is itching at every seam, looking for his familiar comforts, his familiar vices — he needs to be _in control_. But he doesn’t recognize these new streets. The phone they’ve given him doesn’t dial out to any numbers he knows. He doesn’t have instant access to news, or GPS, or even a goddamn Twitter feed. Not because they’re depriving him of it — but because they literally don’t have the technology to spare.

 

For the time being, he doesn’t even have his own name.

 

They set him up in an apartment with some stupid civilian identity Tony doesn’t even bother remembering the name of, complete with a packet of identifying documents. He tries to tell them it’s ridiculous. People will know who he is the moment he steps out the damn door.

 

Then he steps out of aforementioned damn door, and discovers that there aren’t very many _people_ at all.

 

In the short amount of time it takes to travel from the hospital to the apartment, he does manage somewhere buried beneath his agitation, his panic, and the undertow of a grief that threatens to pull him under with every stride into this new world, to appreciate that the city is much better off than he assumed it would have been at this point. The world really did manage to come together, maybe, and salvage what was left of itself; that is, if other places are as seemingly functional as D.C. is right now.

 

He dismisses his appreciation as soon as it he feels it; he should have _been_ here. If he has to be alive — if he has to be the only _fucking_ one of them alive, with Stephen Strange as his last familiar face — then he should have been pouring every goddamn second into repairing the world they left behind.

 

And then he’s thinking of it, hot with the shame of all the things Stark Industries could have done, of all the lives he might have been able to save if Strange had just steered whatever cosmic bullshit he was riding in another direction and gotten him here in time. It is an all too familiar feeling, one that has chased him his entire life; it burns like the brand of a Stark logo on a ticking grenade, like the heat of his panic every time he watched Peter fling himself into Thanos’s path to stop him from crushing their teammates down below.

 

“Where the hell is my company? Pepper? Happy?”

 

Strange shakes his head, and somehow the ground underneath Tony bottoms out again. Somehow he is still falling, five years and god only knows what else slipping through his fingers, through air too thin to breathe.

 

There’s nothing to catch him. No DUM-E to yell at, no scotch to pour down his throat, nothing but utter silence and the tortured reel of his own mind. Everything he built, everyone he ever cared about — everything he had to live for is _gone_.

 

He turns to ask Strange why the _fuck_ he even brought him here, but the man has already left. The bare walls have gone dark around him.

 

Besides, Tony already knows the answer. It’s punishment. This new hell is nothing more than exactly what Tony deserves.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony doesn’t leave the apartment for three days. He’s expecting someone to bother him. There’s no way he can come back from the dead without someone _wanting_ something from him.

 

But nobody needs anything from him; there’s nothing he can give. It is embarrassing that he ever thought someone would come for him in the first place. That’s not the kind of world that they live in anymore.

 

He considers, for a few dark moments, just letting himself die in here. Letting this new world swallow him up as quietly as he came back into it. He can’t think of existing in a state worse than this, with the ghosts of the friends he let die in every corner, with a man who shouldn’t be here looking back at him every time he grazes his reflection in a mirror.

 

When he finally does metaphorically crawl out of the apartment, there is no fanfare, so sense of accomplishment. The newly-paved streets are mostly empty, lined with freshly-planted trees that don’t even go up to his knees. The buildings that border them are almost uniform, like someone cut and copy-pasted them across rows and rows. There are stop signs, not traffic lights, and barely any cars. He sees bikes and people, but so few of them that it seems wrong to call this a _city_ at all.

 

He has to go to the library to even connect to Wi-Fi, and then he has to stand in line to wait for the twenty minutes he’ll have when it’s his turn. It’s almost degrading. He once could fit the entire world in the pad of his pinky finger, and now …

 

It doesn’t help that this mission is utterly without a point. He doesn’t even know what he wants to look for, what he’s hoping to find. Even he can’t compress five years of history into 20 minutes on a rundown public laptop.

 

But he has to know what happened to Stark Industries. Has to have numbers, statistics, details — as awful as they are — about what happened here on Earth while they were away. Has to have some sense of how far they’ve come since. Some way to define the edges of this fucked up, Pepper-less world.

 

The man in front of him in line turns the page of a newspaper he’s reading. Tony sees the black and white image on the page, and it feels like someone has sucker punched him in the throat.

 

Tony grabs for the paper before he even realizes what he’s doing. The resemblance is uncanny. Almost cruel. The same line of a familiar jaw, the same wide eyes, the same unruly brown hair. It is him, and it isn’t — even in black and white, there is no missing the long scar that traces down the boy’s face. There is no missing the gaunt, haunted look in his gaze. Whoever this boy is, this boy with his picture in the only newspaper Tony has seen in days, he looks and _insane_ amount like …

 

_Parker Industries Announces Plan For Free, Global Internet Access By The End Of 2024_

 

His eyes barely skim the caption: _Peter Parker on a visit to Orlando to oversee the installation of the new canal system, July, 2023._

 

“I — I know him.”

 

The man scowls at Tony, taking the newspaper back. “Of course. Everyone knows Peter Parker.”

 

People have turned to stare at him now.

 

“No, I mean, I _know_ him,” says Tony senselessly. He’s still staring at the picture in the man’s hand, staring into the space where it was as he refolds the newspaper in a huff and looks away from Tony. “He’s my … he’s … He’s alive?”

 

“What the hell are you talking about, man?” someone else asks him.

 

“Did something happen to Peter Parker?” a woman murmurs from a little further ahead in line, looking worried.

 

“No, just … this guy is …” says the man with the paper, gesturing vaguely at Tony.

 

They all turn to look at Tony then, who has invariably taken his first opportunity venturing into the public of this new Earth to make a goddamn scene. He stops asking questions then, waiting for his turn at the laptop, reeling with the possibilities.

 

 _Peter’s alive_.

 

But he can’t be. Tony watched it happen. Just before his suit took a hit so critical it essentially became nothing more than a shell, he _watched_ as Peter, one of the last still standing, swung forward to distract Thanos as Gamora and Nebula delivered the death blow that would finish him; watched as Peter crumpled and plummeted, and the viewfinder in Tony’s suit blared red and informed him, on no uncertain terms, that Peter Parker was dead.  

 

And Tony had run to him. Disengaged the useless hunk of metal that was his suit, and _run_. He’d pulled off the kid’s mask, seen the life drained out of his face with his own eyes; sees it like it happened yesterday, because for _fuck’s sake_ , for him it practically _did_.

 

Is this a trick, then? Some … experiment, maybe. Or Strange miscalculated so fucking monumentally that Tony isn’t even in the right reality to begin with.

 

He’s so agitated that he’s making people in line nervous. When he finally, _finally_ gets his hands on a computer, he immediately searches Peter’s name — only to find hundreds of thousands of hits.

 

_Peter Parker, CEO Of Parker Industries (formerly Stark Industries), White House Director of Rehabilitation, Director of the International May Foundation._

 

He spends the next 20 minutes navigating dozens of pages with shaking hands, trying to trace a history from five years back to now. The computer is flooded with images of Peter, with articles on articles; Tony manages to find one from a few months ago, a profile from a website Tony doesn’t even recognize, that seems to chronicle Peter’s rise to what appears to be international renown.

 

And _fuck_ . He did everything Tony would have done, all the things Tony was already plotting during the war to fix in its aftermath, but _better_. He trained a group of civilians to use the unmanned Iron Man suits and provide emergency relief. He organized the peaceful and effective distribution of supplies and first aid and food and water worldwide. He immediately set up the May Foundation to account for orphaned and lost children, using heat-seeking drones to find them and bring them to safety. He managed, even in the first weeks, to assemble teams of trained doctors in every major city not just to organize relief efforts, but to train able-bodied civilians to do the same. He used the Stark Industries hubs all around the world to quickly produce hundreds of thousands of materials that could be shipped and flown out as sets and constructed into houses by untrained citizens, essentially turning the world into an emergency IKEA so people would have roofs over their heads. He organized groups of untethered, directionless teens and twentysomethings en masse, trained them to help organize relief efforts, and sent them across major cities to help oversee construction and city planning on the ground.  

 

But it goes so much deeper than that. Peter and some woman named Michelle Jones are on the forefront of restoring technology, of making public education accessible within two years of the attacks and improving it with each passing month, with enacting universal healthcare in the United States and pushing the effort to other countries that haven’t followed suit.  There’s a new fucking form of _currency_ , some combination of the dollar and the Euro, that is exchanged digitally and used internationally, that seems to have been pioneered almost entirely by _Parker Industries_. They’re in the president’s _cabinet_ , for fuck’s sake.

 

He looks into Michelle Jones, the name ringing some distant bell. One of his previous hires? An SI employee who survived the fallout? It says she’s an Interplanetary Ambassador For Earth, and only then does Tony dig a little deeper and realize she and Peter are in the works of establishing themselves into some kind of intergalactic version of the U.N.

 

Jesus _Christ._ He supposes, though, there is no recapping that can of worms — everyone knows now that Earth isn’t alone. Everyone knows they were lucky to survive this at all, and the only way they’ll survive the next round is by making as many allies as they can.

 

But they’re kids. Kids shouldn’t have to be the ones establishing peace treaties. Kids shouldn’t have to be the ones bracing their planet for another war.

 

Tony knows their whole cleanup plan isn’t without flaws. No systems this wide enacted in a world this uncertain come without bumps or delays and issues that need working out. But the headlines screaming off the page all seem to agree on one thing and one thing alone: in the last five years, Peter Parker has been instrumental to saving the world.

 

Or at least, the ghost of him has.

 

There isn’t a shred of detail about Peter as a person. Only the basics, which Tony’s still hard-pressed to find, navigating this new search engine: that he lived in Queens; that he interned with Tony Stark; that he’s based in D.C., when his rehabilitation efforts don’t have him on the road. There is no biographical information about his age, or his family, or — most notably, considering all that has happened since — a single mention of Spider-Man.

 

No wonder Strange let him think the kid was dead. The only version of Peter the team ever knew has been gone just as long as they have.

 

A timer goes off and someone nudges his shoulder for their turn at the computer. Tony walks out in a daze, feeling like he’s been drowning and someone just pressed so much air into his lungs that his body doesn’t know what to do with it.

 

It’s relief. It’s pride. It is some justification for that moment that Rhodey stood over him, serving as a witness as Tony finalized his will on his way out the door, signing everything over to Pepper and, should anything happen to her, to Peter.

 

“He’s a _kid_ ,” Rhodey had tried to reason with him.

 

Tony shrugged the words off. “I know what I’m doing.”

 

“Jesus,” said Rhodey. “You’d better.”

 

But he hadn’t. Not really. He’d only known that Peter was the only one who had the drive for it, who had the understanding — who had the heart. When the day came in 20, 30 years, Peter would be more than ready to take over whatever he and Pepper left behind.

 

The day came much sooner than he’d ever expected, and far more brutally. Peter, it seems, turned out to be more ready than Tony ever anticipated he’d have to be. Than anyone ever should.

 

He isn’t proud of himself for doing it, but he waits until night falls and breaks back into the library. He gets a hang of the new tech now that he’s actually focused on it, but there isn’t any streetview to rely on, no functioning satellites in orbit. No way to find Peter using any of his old tricks. He finally manages to track him down by hacking a White House HR employee’s email (not without an odd sense of deja vu) and unearthing Peter’s personnel file to find an address in D.C. that, if his estimations aren’t too off, is within walking distance of where Tony is right now.

 

His heart clenches in his chest. For the first time since he woke up, Tony stops wishing that he never had.

 

* * *

 

He spends the next few days looking for the kid. He hovers around the Parker Industries D.C. office, a nondescript building a few blocks away from the newly constructed White House. He frequents that area too. He walks streets in between there and the address where Peter lives, just short of showing up on the doorstep.

 

It occurs to him that he could do just that. Knock on the kid’s door, and see him whole and alive and undoubtedly stunned. Tony tells himself he’s avoiding it because he doesn’t want to corner Peter, doesn’t want to scare him after all these years, but there is some other truth, too — that Tony wants to see him the way he is now first. Wants to observe him. Wants to see what the 21-year-old Peter Parker in that newspaper picture is like separate of him, separate of the world they once knew.

 

It is the closest thing to having any semblance of _control_ in this situation that Tony can find; when Tony finally does find Peter, of course, all of those plans stumble right out of the window.

 

It’s dusk, a balmy kind of August night, the kind that Tony has already learned to hate — it’s so achingly familiar to nights in happier, more colorful times that there are moments he can almost forget that he is essentially a foreigner on his own planet. The streets are nearly empty — most people have long since gone home for the night — save for one wiry, familiar figure, dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a worn button-up shirt, a beaten up leather bag ( _my old bag,_ Tony realizes with a start) slung over his shoulder.

 

He falls into step about a block behind him, on the edges of a park, and that’s when Tony feels a flicker of doubt. The figure in front of him isn’t walking with that aggressively bright, determined gait of the kid Tony once knew, but is moving considerably slower, with a noticeable limp. Tony scowls, and then the figure turns to cut through the park.

 

Even in the dark, the profile of his face is unmistakable — it’s Peter.

 

He disappears into the park, and Tony waits for a beat before following him in. He expects the kid to turn around at any moment, expects to be caught out, but Peter just keeps moving.

 

Until he isn’t.

 

“What do you want?”

 

Tony blinks, stopping short. Peter hasn’t turned around, but there’s no doubt that the question is aimed at him. There’s nobody else around.

 

“I don’t have any money,” says Peter, his voice steely and uncompromising. “If you want my help, you can ask for it.”

 

The word is tumbling out of his mouth before Tony can even consider what’s on the other side of it. “Kid.”

 

Peter turns so sharply then that Tony almost flinches, even from a distance. Peter takes a step toward him, the faint light from a streetlamp outside of the park illuminating his face.

 

It’s Peter, but it isn’t. It’s Peter, five years older, but for a flicker so _painfully young_ that the lost look in Peter’s eyes is more than he can take.

 

But then that gaze hardens, and Peter fully turns to look at Tony. Tony sees the entirety of him now — this unyielding, unfamiliar _soldier_ staring at him out of Peter Parker’s eyes. His face is paler than Tony ever remembers it being, making the scar that courses down it all the more glaring in the darkness. His jaw is tight, his body primed like he is bracing himself for some kind of blow.

 

Tony opens his mouth to say something, but words don’t seem like enough. The mere sight of the kid has pushed all the words right out of him.

 

“Fuck,” Peter breathes, turning his back on Tony. He shakes his head then. “I’m not doing this again.”

 

For a moment Tony is too stunned to react.

 

“Kid, wait,” he says, jogging to catch up with him. It doesn’t take long, the way the kid moves now, but Peter stares straight ahead as if he doesn’t see Tony there.

 

“ _Peter_.”

 

“Go away,” Peter says under his breath, pinching his eyes shut, grinding his teeth.

 

“Look, you have … every right to be mad at me. Hell, let me at least explain — ”

 

“You’re not real. This isn’t real,” says Peter, more to himself than to Tony. Definitely to himself — he’s not even _looking_ at Tony, his eyes cast so determinedly on the path in front of him that it’s as if Tony isn’t even there.

 

“Of course it is,” says Tony, scoffing. “Kid, would you just _look_ at me?”

 

“Please go away.” Peter has stopped now, his entire face wrenching in agony. “I’m sorry. I’ve told you — so many times how _sorry_ I am, and … I can’t … I can’t do this again.”

 

“You can’t be — do you have any idea how much of a fucking _relief_ it is to see you? I thought you were _dead_ , kid. And I know this is insane, and probably a lot to take in, but you can’t just — would you _stop_ walking away from me?”

 

“Why the _hell_ should I?” Peter demands. He still won’t look at Tony, but Tony can see his eyes are rimmed and red, almost bruised with exhaustion. He looks somehow ten years younger and ten years older than he should at the same time. He lowers his voice again and says, “It’s always the same. You’re here but you’re not. I can’t — fuck. Why am I even talking to you? You’re not _real_.”

 

“Do you … do you think you’re hallucinating or something?” Tony asks. He tries to keep his tone light, but it’s impossible. The kid’s pain is so palpable that it feels thick in the air between them.

 

Only then do Peter’s eyes lock on his, stained with five long years of Tony doesn’t even want to know what. “I know I am,” he says, He sucks in a breath that rattles in his throat and says one last time, “Please, _please_ , just leave me alone.”

 

Tony is so blindsided by the implication of Peter’s words that he forgets to move. He tries to imagine, then, a sixteen-year-old Peter returning to Earth; a sixteen-year-old Peter alone and scared and bearing the burden of thinking he was the lone survivor of their battle. It was an unbearable enough cross for Tony to bear for three days; he can’t imagine the impact of living with it for all of these years.

 

Peter is walking away from him now, and Tony lets him. He doesn’t know what else to do. Wait until daylight, maybe. Until there are other people around, and Peter knows he isn’t imagining it.

 

 _I’m sorry. I’ve told you — so many times how_ sorry _I am._

 

Fuck. What did the kid think he had to be _sorry_ for? Tony dragged him into a goddamn war, then left him alone with the burden of the much bigger one that came after. The last person who should be apologizing to _anyone_ is Peter Parker.

 

Tony turns, then, to go back the way he came. To go back to his apartment, and try to think of how the hell he can fix this.

 

But then, before Tony even makes it a few steps away, he hears a thud — turns to see Peter crumpling to his knees, gasping, his hand pressed into his chest and bunching in his shirt.

 

“Shit,” says Tony, running back over to him. He kneels down, seeing Peter’s face taut with pain. “Kid, what’s … what’s happening?”

 

Peter ignores him, his breath coming too fast, his hand still pressed against his heart. He starts to sink a little closer to the pavement, and only when Tony grabs him by the shoulders to brace him do Peter’s eyes fly open into his, so disarmed that he seems to forget how to breathe altogether.

 

“ _How_ … how’re you …”

 

“I’ve got you, kid, it’s okay,” says Tony, lying through his teeth because it _isn’t okay_ , because he might have just given the kid a literal fucking _heart attack_ just moments after getting him back.

 

Peter tries to answer, but only manages to let out a wheeze.

 

“You just gotta breathe,” Tony tells him, trying to swallow the panic rising like acid in his throat. “Is there someone we can call, or …”

 

Peter has just enough wherewithal to shake his head. “No … it just … does this sometimes,” he says. He lets out a shudder and then slackens, his fingers uncurling from the fabric of his shirt, his hand falling from his chest. “It’s — it’s fine. It’s over, it’s fine,” he mutters, his breathing finally evening out.

 

“What just ‘does this sometimes’?” Tony demands. He stares into the kid’s clouded eyes and tries to reconcile this version of Peter with the one he remembers, with that boundless energy and perilous sense of invincibility, but it’s hard to think of anything past his immediate and pulsing worry. “Kid — ’

 

The word seems to strike some nerve, because Peter’s eyes snap to meet his like he only just noticed him there. In an instant he wrenches his entire body, pulling himself out of Tony’s grasp and stumbling to his feet.

 

“Hey,” says Tony sharply. “Slow down, just —  _kid._ ”

 

Peter _runs_. Tony doesn’t try to chase him, just watches, the concern tightening like a band in his chest as Peter takes off into the darkness, clearly favoring his bad leg but managing an impressive speed regardless. Tony walks out of the park in enough time to see Peter tear sharply down a street that Tony knows won’t take him home, but back to the Parker Industries offices.

 

Tony doesn’t know how long he stands there, his hands curled into fists; doesn’t know how long he stands there, hating himself for what he did to this _kid_ who so clearly hasn’t been one since the ill-fated day Tony pulled him onto a ship and sealed his fate.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony doesn’t mean to — fuck, he should know better than this — but he finds himself walking to that address he found when he first started looking for Peter. Finds himself in front of a little home identical to all the others on the street, to all the others in the city, with the door painted blue and flowers in the window and a bicycle propped up on the lawn. Finds his bones aching in some stupid, sentimental way he always managed to ignore in the _before_ , but can’t seem to shake off here in the _after_.

 

He lingers there, not really meaning to do anything more than glance. Then he sees a woman in the window, talking to someone over her shoulder. Not a woman, really, but a girl who carries herself like one —  _Michelle Jones_ , Tony’s brain supplies. Not from the articles online, but from someplace deeper than that. From Peter’s excited pubescent chatter in the backseat of a car, his face scrunching from a milkshake-induced brain freeze; from the screen of his phone when he pulled it out to not-so-covertly answer text messages while he was in the lab; from the station Peter lingered at during the science fair, pulling Tony over because _whoa_ , isn’t her project _so cool?_  

 

The relief almost carves a pit inside of him. At least Peter hasn’t been alone.

 

And then he sees Peter himself, walking like a zombie from the other side of the street, still looking shaken from their encounter the hour before. Tony doesn’t move, doesn’t let the kid see him again. Honestly, he just wants to make sure Peter’s okay. He’s about to turn his back and go when he’s distracted by the swing of an opening door, by a pair of short little legs and a shock of brown curls shooting out of it like a rocket, headed toward Peter like he has some kind of sonar on him.

 

“ _Dad!_ ” the little person crows.

 

Peter blinks; the worry leaves his face in an instant, and he cracks into a smile so genuine and so warm that Tony is too stricken by how much he finally resembles the 15-year-old Tony once knew to catch up to what the _hell_ that tiny creature just called him. Peter lowers himself to his knees and extends his arms out, aforementioned tiny creature launching himself into them.

 

“ _Oof_ ,” says Peter, as little arms wrap around his neck and squeeze. Peter wraps his arms around him and pulls the boy in closer. “Hey, little buddy.”

 

The gears in Tony’s brain have quite possibly stopped altogether. He watches, transfixed, understanding what is happening but not quite able to accept it.

 

“You’re _late_ ,” the little boy says accusatorily.

 

“I know, bud, I know,” says Peter, his words taking on this soothing, authoritative tone. He closes his eyes for a beat, presses the kid a little closer to him, running a hand through the sloppy curls and breathing him in. “I’m sorry. Won’t happen again.”

 

The kid wriggles out of Peter’s embrace, a gap-toothed grin seeming to indicate that all is forgiven. Then he takes both hands and wraps them around Peter’s arm, dragging him up to his feet.

 

“Come inside,” he says, “I made you something at school.”

 

Peter lets himself be dragged for a moment, then pries his arm out of the little boy’s hands, sneaks up behind him, and picks him up in one fell swoop. The boy shrieks happily as Peter carries him into the house, lugging him over his shoulder, spinning around for effect.

 

There’s a brief, heart-stopping moment then, when the boy is giggling and looks across the street and makes such damning eye contact with Tony that he’s sure he’s been given away. It feels like something has suctioned the universe, even in that brief nothing of an exchange; like Tony knows that little face, like he recognizes it from some other time, some other life.

 

But then Peter eases the boy back to the ground and they cross back over the entrance and shut the door behind them, leaving Tony to contemplate the impossible, unfathomable thing he just discovered in their wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OMG, you guys. I was so hesitant to write this, it being some straight up post-apocalyptic angst (with some politics sprinkled in?? help), but I am so heartened that people are reading. #Bless you for your patience. My chapters for this are going to be longer than others have been in the past so it's gonna be a bit more time between updates, but will hopefully be worth it, because plot.


	3. Chapter 3

MJ waits until James is asleep in the bedroom to walk over to where Peter is sitting on the couch, thread her fingers through his hair, and give it a light enough tug that he has to look up at her.

 

“Something happened,” she says.

 

His lips crease for a moment, his eyes steady and a little watery on hers before he says, “Yeah.”

 

She slides onto the cushions, pressing herself into him, and shuts both of their laptops. Peter doesn’t protest. They have to do this for each other sometimes; otherwise they might never stop.

 

“What was it this time?” she asks.

 

The name is bitter on Peter’s tongue. “Tony,” he says, casting his eyes to her lap. He burrows a little further into her, the two of them so used to each other’s curves and angles that there is an effortlessness to it, a sense that they’ve tangled their roots into each other and don’t know how to grow any other way.

 

“Hmmm,” says MJ sympathetically.

 

“Weird, though. This time it was — just him. None of the others.”

 

It’s a strange secret they keep between them, the hallucinations Peter sometimes has. MJ isn’t even sure if he has told her the full extent of them.

 

He isn’t crazy. They both thought he might be for a hot second, when it started. It was MJ who held onto every shred of detail Peter gave her in the brief moments he opened up about the battle itself, MJ who connected the dots and assumed that whatever Thanos did to them with the mind stone was responsible for whatever the hell was getting projected in his unsuspecting brain.

 

It seems to happen more often these days. She knows it’s not the only thing that’s been getting worse.

 

“You should tell me when it happens,” she reminds him, not for the first time.

 

Peter nudges her shoulder and says, “Yeah, well, same to you.”

 

“I’m not the one running around talking to dead people like Hamlet in a graveyard.”

 

This earns a huff of a laugh from Peter, his breath warm against her neck. After a moment he says quietly, “I heard you in your sleep. Talking to your sister.”

 

MJ blinks, but then the dream comes back the way dreams sometimes do the long day after they happen, hazy around the edges and pierced by sharp details — her sister’s locs whipping in that satisfying way they did when she threw her head back to laugh, the flash of the gold, jangling bracelets she was always trying to loan to MJ, the dark steady eyes of MJ’s little niece in her arms.

 

MJ misses her parents. Misses Ned, and the decathlon team, and Mrs. Johnson who lived next door and watched her when she was little. She misses the bread lady at her bodega and the crossing guard and every single person whose path she used to unconsciously cross, back when the world was a song on replay, all of them settled in their familiar beats and pulses and doing the same things every day.

 

But it’s her sister she misses most of all.

 

Sometimes she imagines that her sister can hear her. Not in the way Peter actually, literally talks to the ghosts of his past — fuck it all, if watching him do that the first few times wasn’t one of the scariest things MJ has ever witnessed — but like her sister can hear the thoughts MJ aims at her, like she’s listening in when MJ lets her.

 

She wishes sometimes, in the better moments, that she could show her sister that they found their little version of okay. That she has a family of her own now. That there are still things that can hit her from behind and fill her with an impossible kind of joy, like turning her head to see Peter and James curled into each other asleep on the couch, or watching James’s little face light up the first time he saw snow, or watching something she planted in the ground or built with her bare hands take root in a place and stay there. Like the moments she sometimes breathes this place in, with its thin walls and its faint smell of pasta sauce and mildew and its salvaged furniture and the word that comes to mind, against all odds, is _home_.

 

Peter is pressing methodical circles into her palm, both of their eyelids sliding shut. They could just fall asleep right here like this. They could, but they won’t. Peter has to pack James’s lunch for tomorrow and will no doubt spend the rest of the night on his laptop, reworking specs for plans on who even knows what he’s working on this week. MJ has a call with several state officials in China and India scheduled in an hour, documents for further proposed laws on translator chips and unregulated civilian contact with interplanetary species to draft, and a _shit_ load of emails to power through.

 

It’s tough work. Sometimes MJ has this fantasy where all three of them just nap for an entire day, and wake up on the other side of it remembering what it feels like to sleep eight full hours in a row again. But they’re planting seeds now, and they have to make them count; MJ is all too aware of how fragile that ground is, how fast an outsider can rip something out if the roots aren’t deep enough to hold.

 

* * *

 

When MJ was growing up, she stalked Peter Parker. She practically knew he was Spider-Man before _he_ knew he was Spider-Man. It was almost embarrassing, how well she knew the ins and outs of his days, his unconscious tics and tells; how the day Liz successfully recruited him for decathlon MJ’s heart went up into her throat when she saw those skinny nerd limbs and that tousled hair walk through the door.

 

In middle school, before they were friends, she’d spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking up excuses to talk to him. Mostly she just found excuses to irritate him, which seemed to suit the situation just fine. In that prepubescent, 11-year-old-girl-with-her-first-big-crush way, she used to take it a step further and imagine situations where he’d be _forced_ to talk to her, and the idea of something happening where they were in danger or needed each other or were the last two people on earth seemed like some overblown dramatic, preteen fantasy.

 

It doesn’t seem appropriate to say that the joke’s on her, but it kind of is. The preteen fantasy became a very real teenage nightmare. Became her very present adult reality.

 

But finding Peter alive after the war wasn’t romantic at all. It was terrifying. There was a period of about a day when she’d heard the rumor he was the mysterious figure behind the Stark Industries relief effort but hadn’t actually seen him, didn’t actually have _proof_ , and it might have been one of the worst of her life; she kept thinking to herself that if he wasn’t there — if she’d been stupid enough to let herself feel this kind of hope, stupid enough to fill herself to the brim with it when she _knew better_ , god _damn it_ — that it might really do her in. That it might be the final thing to unwind her.

 

And then there he was, standing in the doorway, staring at her like he was seeing a ghost. Staring at her with those absurdly large, Peter Parker eyes, in that ratty wrinkled shirt, with a _baby_ in his arms.

 

MJ doesn’t have a lot to laugh about most days, but she does occasionally get a kick out of the idea of going back in time and telling her 11-year-old self that one day she would, in fact, be in spending the end of the world with Peter Parker … and co-parenting the secret child of Tony Stark.

 

“Mimi?”

 

MJ looks up from her laptop to the sound of a piping little voice and the sight of big brown eyes and some aggressively adorable curls that are in desperate need of a trim. For a kid that is technically no part Parker, James has always done a bizarrely good job of looking like one.

 

“What’s up, punk?” MJ asks him, pushing her keyboard aside.

 

James has a pencil in his hand and a piece of paper perched in his lap. “What’s your favorite color?”

 

MJ narrows her eyes at him playfully. “Who wants to know?”

 

James sticks his tongue out at her, a quirk he may or may not have picked up from her. “School,” he says, turning his attention back to the slightly crumpled page. “I have to fill in fun facts about my family members.”

 

“What other _fun facts_ are you filling in about me?” she asks, peering over his shoulder. “Also, does this appear to be an assignment you’ve put off until …” She glances at the clock on her laptop. “Approximately two minutes before I’m walking you to school?”

 

James bites down a smile. The expression is so endearingly _Peter_ that MJ immediately loses all pretense of scolding him. “Maybe,” he says.  

 

MJ peers over James’s shoulder, looking at his messy five-year-old scrawl on the page. MJ doesn’t have to have been around too many kids to know that it’s pretty damn remarkable that he’s reading and writing at this level in kindergarten, but she supposes that’s the deal when you combine Potts and Stark DNA and hand it over to two national decathlon champs. (Okay, _one_ national decathlon champ. They may have escaped death approximately 37 times between them, but she’ll never let Peter live 2017 down.)

 

She sees that he’s taken some liberties filling in their favorite foods, their favorite books, their favorite songs. She sees a column for favorite animals and pauses; for “Mimi” he put down “dogs,” but for “Dad” he put down “spiders”.

 

MJ stares at it a beat too long. Long enough that James’s eyebrows knit together and he says, “Mimi? Are we gonna be late?”

 

She claps her hands together. “That we are. Go find some shoes. Go, go, go.”

 

James scampers off, the assignment clutched in his little fingers, as MJ blows out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. _Spiders_. Where the _hell_ did their adorable dweeb get that?

 

She chalks it up to coincidence, hustling James out the door. She has enough to worry about. She doesn’t need to go looking for trouble where there isn’t any.

 

MJ may be a chronic speed walker, but nobody, really, is a match for James. He’s constantly a step ahead of her, half-jogging, half-skipping on his short little legs and darting glances back to make sure she’s keeping up, some combination of Peter’s bullheadedness and MJ’s wariness. It’s the line James always seems to teeter on as he grows into himself and into them; how he has Peter’s unabashed dorkiness, but MJ’s cutting bluntness. How she catches him talking to himself like she occasionally will, or talking _way_ too much like Peter still does.

 

How she sometimes sees flashes that aren’t her or Peter at all; a patent kind of mischief. An almost innocent, but entirely intentional brand of snark. The occasional boundary that gets tested _just to see_ before being left alone. The tilt of his head when he hears something that makes him sad, and for a moment his eyes are so steady and thoughtful that MJ has to blink away the last time she saw Pepper alive.

 

She reminds herself, though, that in every way that counts, James is their kid. Peter may have balked at first at the idea of having James call him “Dad” (“It just … seems disrespectful to Mr. Stark,” he said, with a guilt in his expression MJ knew better than to try to dissect in the light of day), but MJ stepped in as the voice of reason — no kid would call his dad _Peter_. If they wanted to keep flying under the radar as two sixteen-year-olds with a squalling baby getting passed between them, they had to take every precaution they could.

 

James doesn’t call MJ “Mom” because nobody in their right mind would think they were genetically related. On the birth records they eventually drew up, they wrote that James’s biological mom was Betty Brant. (MJ’s idea, and only because she bore a vague resemblance to Pepper. What? The girl’s long dead and MJ figures she would have been a bro about it.) MJ legally adopted him after the dust settled and they forged documents claiming to be three years older than they were; it was a bit of a stretch, given the Parker puppy dog eyes, but nobody had the wherewithal to question them when the world was still recovering from becoming a literal dumpster fire.

 

Small blessings, she supposes. Otherwise someone would have made the obvious connection between Tony Stark’s former protege and Spider-Man a long, long time ago, and they’d all three of them be screwed.

 

“Have a good day at school, punk,” she tells James. “Your dad’s picking you up.” She tweaks his side and feels a strange kind of wistfulness hearing his little kid giggle, knowing it’s only a matter of time he grows out of it; she can’t believe she’s 21 years old and waxing poetic about her progeny growing up too fast.

 

James disappears into his classroom and MJ nods at some of the other parents, immediately checking her phone for missed calls and updates. Her office is only about a mile from the school; she’s directing a call back to the UK’s secretary of state when she turns the corner and nearly barrels straight into a man.

 

She meets his eye to apologize and then says, “Oh, fuck.”

 

Tony Stark blows out a breath, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Great,” he says. The old bluster she remembers is still there, but tinged with something else. An exhaustion. A guilt. Something far more human than she remembers. “Apparently _nobody_ is happy to see me.”

 

MJ casts a glance back down the street. Nobody’s even looking at them. She takes a step closer, wondering if this is some kind of trap, and says through her teeth, “Not if it means I’m losing my mind, I’m not.”

 

“You’re not. Losing your mind, I mean.” He gestures vaguely, at the street, at the world around them. “At least, not about me.”

 

MJ doesn’t move. _Can’t_ move. She knows she isn’t imagining him; unlike Peter, she can always tell the difference between her dreams and reality, which in these days is both a blessing and a curse. But as miraculous as it is to walk down a street and see a person who should be long dead, she can’t help the immediate, reflexive, selfish part of her that wishes he would just … disappear.

 

“But _I_ might be,” says Tony, “because if I’m not mistaken, you and the kid … have a _kid_.”

 

There it is. The crux of it. The first thought that flies into MJ’s mind, and already Tony is prodding it like an open wound — she knows she should be wondering how the hell he got here, how the hell he’s _alive_ and where he’s _been_ all this time and why _right now_ — but all she can think about is the precious, perfect, little bug-eyed nerd baby she just dropped off at school, and what the fuck this is going to mean for him.

 

“I mean, Jesus. How _old_ is he?”

 

MJ doesn’t answer. Instead she asks, “How the fuck are you here right now?”

 

“Honestly, I’ve been trying to do the math here and — ”

 

“ _Tony_.”

 

He blinks, then, and shakes his head like he is pulling himself out of some thought too deep to follow through. He looks her in the eye, sizing up her face, and says, “It’s a long story. I want to tell it. But I gotta talk to the kid first, and I gotta do it without scaring the life out of him like I did last night.”

 

Shit. _Shit_. Peter _wasn’t_ imagining him. Last night, when he came home with bloodshot eyes and shaking hands —  _just him, none of the others_ — he’d actually been talking to Tony Fucking Stark.

 

That is, if this _is_ Tony Stark.

 

MJ can’t even use that as an excuse to dismiss him; she knows it’s him. She feels it in her gut. She feels it in that tether between her and James and Peter, the one she holds so tight that even this slight ripple in it is enough to fill her with fear.

 

“I’ll talk to him first and we'll get in touch,” she says.

 

Tony shakes his head. “No, I’ve got to talk to him now.”

 

MJ’s expression is cutting, and Tony isn’t expecting it. Good. Let him be surprised. Let him remember, for a moment, that he may be Tony Stark, but she’s the Secretary of Education, the goddamn Interplanetary Ambassador For Earth, the fucking Vice President of Parker Industries. Let him remember that he is not talking to a child, but to someone who can sic an entire security squad on him and have him locked up in a heartbeat.

 

Maybe he respects that and maybe he doesn’t. But MJ can’t help the slight chip in her resolve when the great Tony Stark’s bloodshot eyes lock on hers and he says, “Please.”

 

She supposes there is no delaying the inevitable. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll call his office. You wait here.”

 

* * *

 

A few hours later they’re sitting at the kitchen table, Peter and MJ on one side, and Tony Stark on the other. In between them are three cups of tea that MJ for some reason insisted on making, as if that could lessen the blow of someone’s mentor/pseudo-father/problematic idol coming back from the dead. As if that could lessen the impact of the the fear pulsing under their feet, beating into the floor: _What about James?_

 

Nobody’s spoken much. Peter’s skin looks like paper. Tony keeps fidgeting, looking at Peter, who will occasionally look back but not for long, staring at every part of the room that isn’t Tony instead. MJ feels invisible in her own home.

 

She glances toward the door. “Should I … “

 

“No,” says Peter immediately, before she can even finish the sentence.

 

She brushes a hand on his forearm. _Okay_.

 

After a moment, Tony clears his throat. “I … I’m not sure where to start. Except that shit, kid. I’m glad you’re alive.”

 

Peter doesn’t even react, glancing at MJ like he needs confirmation that she’s still seeing Tony sitting there, too.

 

“I’m sorry, uh — how are you — ” Peter stops, swallowing hard. “How are you here?”

 

“Fair question. I’m still not sure on the details myself,” says Tony. He thins out his lips for a moment, his eyes cast toward the floor, and says, “It seems our friend Dr. Strange found me after the battle and pulled me through some kind of portal. I only got here a week ago.”

 

“A portal that took you five years to go through?” MJ asks, narrowing her eyes. “Because _that’s_ how long you’ve been gone.”  

 

Tony holds his hands up. “I don’t know how his space-time-bullshit continuum works. All I know is that one second, I was …”

 

His eyes trail over to Peter and a shadow crosses them. Peter finally meets his gaze, then, and something somber passes between them that is almost excruciating for MJ to watch — even after all this time, her details on the fight with Thanos are few and far between.

 

“And then I was here.”

 

Peter nods. MJ wonders if his tongue has fallen out of his mouth.

 

“How did _you_ …? I mean, kid. I know what I saw,” Tony starts. “You were —  Jesus, kid. I watched you die. I saw your face. I — ”

 

Peter flinches, and only then does MJ realize that she has grabbed his arm in a vice grip, that her fingers are wrapped so tightly around him that his skin is turning white.

 

“Sorry,” she mutters, releasing him. He’s never told her about that. She just assumed he’d been wounded when he was picked up. She doesn’t want to think about how close this fragile little life they’ve cobbled together came to never happening at all.

 

Peter takes her hand under the table and squeezes it briefly, then clears his throat and says, “Uh, yeah. I was, I guess … for a little bit. Dead.” He cringes, and then says, “But Big — um, Quill and his crew found me. I guess they tried to revive any of us they could, and I … well, next thing I knew I was waking up with Rocket in my face on a ship bound for Earth.” He waits a beat before he breathes the word, “Alone.”

 

Another heavy silence settles over them. MJ picks up her tea and chugs it like it’s something else, letting it burn her tongue and her throat as it goes down.

 

“I read up on … well, as much as I could,” says Tony. He pauses for a moment, like he is trying to be careful with his words, like he’s trying to make them count. “You did a good job, kid. An amazing one. I mean — shit. It’s insane, how much you’ve done. I’m proud of you. Both of you.”

 

MJ holds back a snort. The last thing on this earth that she needs is Tony Stark’s validation. Even Peter seems uncomfortable, like he doesn’t quite know where to let it settle on his skin.

 

“Thanks,” says Peter, the word coming out flat.

 

“And you have a — you have a kid?”

 

MJ’s eyes cut over to Peter’s. She feels him see it, but he doesn’t look back at her. He doesn’t have to. They’re already on the same page.

 

“Yeah,” he says, his throat sounding dry. He doesn’t offer anything more.

 

“So — he’s yours?”

 

Peter bows his head down and says, “Yeah.”

 

Tony blows out a breath. “So you come back from the war … and find out you have a kid.”

 

He pauses for a moment, and honestly, MJ thinks she’s forgotten how to breathe. They can’t tell him. _They have to tell him_. Fuck. _Fuck_.

 

MJ prides herself on being a person who plans ahead. A person who is methodical, a person who thinks of the best and worst case scenarios and every scenario in between. She watches. She waits. She _plans_.

 

Not in a million years could she have planned for this.

 

“Shit. I’m practically a grandfather.”

 

Peter lets out a strangled noise that might have been a laugh. MJ doesn’t move a muscle. Tony breaks the silence by clapping his hands together and saying, “So — so tell me about him. This, uh. This kid of yours.”

 

“He’s great,” says Peter. It’s the most earnest answer Tony has gotten out of him since they walked into the house. And then, bless his stupid, overly sentimental little heart, he just can’t help himself: “He’s — smart and just — the funniest, and curious about everything, and so — good. He’s just … he’s just the best.”

 

“Well, of course he is,” says Tony. “He’s yours.”

 

Peter’s face turns crimson, and he mumbles something only barely coherent in reply. In that brief moment, MJ can see the question brewing in Tony’s eyes — can see the faint disbelief that a then 15-year-old, painfully affable Peter Parker somehow knocked a girl up before heading off into space to fight a war — but he apparently decides not to press the point just yet.

 

“I can’t wait to meet him,” says Tony. MJ can see the unmistakable gleam of pride in his eyes, can tell that he means it. That somehow makes it worse.

 

When neither MJ or Peter responds, Tony picks up his mug, sniffs the contents and says, “Okay, then … tell me about … ‘Parker Industries’.”

 

MJ is the one who answers him. “What do you want to know?”

 

She asks it only because she knows he won’t like some of what they have to say. MJ has never stopped very often to consider it over the years — she’s been busy weighing consequences far more dire than _What would Tony Stark think?_ to care — but most of their calls weren’t necessarily ones Tony would have made. Tony listens with a surprising raptness as Peter recounts all the tech they put to use and the scores of things he’s developed with his team since, but MJ doesn’t let her guard down. Sure enough, the moment they get to the business of the company ownership, she sees Tony frown.

 

“Wait, so … Parker Industries is basically the president’s play thing?” Tony asks.

 

“No,” says MJ, cutting in. “It’s government subsidized. But President Ramirez has never questioned any of our decisions.”

 

“Uh,” says Tony, in that old combative way of his. Peter stiffens at her side. “I’m sorry, why did we need the Oval Office to cosign in the first place? What was the point of changing it to ‘Parker Industries’ when you could just as easily change it to Uncle Sam’s?”   

 

MJ leans forward to let Peter know she’s got this. “We had the tech and the plan, but it wasn’t enough,” says MJ. “If Stark Industries was able to save the whole world on its own before the war, I’d like to think there’d have been significantly less shit happening on it.” She stands up a little straighter, gratified that he doesn’t try to interrupt her. “Ramirez had the influence and the resources to help where we couldn’t. You heard all about Ramirez before the war — her reputation preceded her. People trust her. It was instrumental to the relief effort. It still is.”

 

“What, people don’t trust Stark Industries?” Tony quips.

 

No. They don’t. But if someone hasn’t already caught Tony up on that particular development, then she doesn’t want to have to be the one who does. She and Peter have already spent enough time and effort trying to dodge the shadow cast on all of the Avengers after the war; none is quite so dark as the one cast on Tony Stark.

 

Tony, evidently, isn’t finished with his trail of thought: “And you trust Ramirez, sure, but what about who comes after her?”

 

Peter bristles the way he always does when someone questions MJ. “I imagine whoever is elected after her — ”

 

“What, you think you can predict that?” He turns back to Peter. “Kid — ”

 

“Don’t — don’t call me that,” says Peter, earning a slightly taken aback look from Tony. It only seems to strengthen Peter’s resolve. Peter’s fists curl in his lap, his brow furrowing, and MJ feels that secondhand kind of satisfaction she feels when Peter goes full on Captain America levels of indignant. “You have no idea what it was like. People were dying. Choices had to be made. For the record, I don’t regret any of ours.”

 

Peter’s eyes flit unconsciously toward the bedroom, to the open door where a pair of James’s dirty socks are visible on the floor.

 

MJ doesn’t expect Tony to actually back down. She supposes, though, that he doesn’t have enough friends left to afford to lose even one.

 

“Shit, kid. I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m — I’m trying to catch up here, okay? I didn’t mean to …”

 

“No, no,” says Peter, who almost seems a little embarrassed. He relaxes a bit in his seat, wrapping his hands around his tea mug. “I know this must all be — super weird to you.”

 

“Speaking of super weird,” says Tony (MJ has _not_ missed this man’s chronic inability to make a proper segue, that’s for sure), “what’s with the whole Gregory House thing you’ve got going? I mean, your leg — what the hell happened to your healing factor?”

 

Peter shrugs. “I … I don’t know, really,” he says.  

 

“And the _Star Wars_ villain scar?” Tony prompts him. And then, all of the teasing out of his tone, “And the whole … spontaneous heart attack thing?”

 

MJ looks at him sharply. “It happened again?”

 

Peter winces. “I — I meant to tell you.”

 

Tony presses on. “That’s not normal, k — ” He stops himself just in time. MJ doesn’t miss the beat where his face seems to dim a bit; she wonders if it’s frustrating to him, that in this world he really doesn’t have any authority over Peter anymore. “We’ll take you to Strange. I’m sure he can do something — ”

 

Peter shakes his head.

 

“What, your abilities are gone and you just don’t care?”

 

Tony doesn’t seem upset, just genuinely bewildered. It strikes in some unexpected place in MJ’s heart — how to Tony, a few days ago, Peter was a bright-eyed, unabashedly excited junior Avenger. How a world that seems like another lifetime to MJ, a world where she was safe and owned a mountain of barely laundered t-shirts and hoarded boxes of Thin Mints to share with Peter and Ned, seems to Tony like it’s only a heartbeat away.

 

She has to look away from him. Otherwise it’ll seem too close to her again, too.

 

“I mean — where’s the suit, Peter? What happened to Spider-Man? Why aren’t you — ”

 

“Spider-Man’s dead,” says Peter. There’s a nervous edge in his voice. “With the rest of the Avengers. Tony, you should know — ”

 

“Come to think of it, where are _my_ suits?” Tony asks. “I mean … they can’t all have been destroyed when — ”

 

“They’re not suits anymore. Well, not humanoid ones,” says MJ, so Peter doesn’t have to. “They were redesigned so they don’t … look like Iron Man.” Tony opens his mouth to ask, his face already twisting into the beginnings of a scowl, but she preempts him: “After everything that happened with Thanos, people were furious with the Avengers. They blame them for what happened.”

 

Tony sounds like her words just knocked the air out of him. “Excuse me —  _what?_ ”

 

“I’m sorry,” says Peter.

 

MJ frowns. He has nothing to apologize for.

 

“Are you — are you _kidding_ me?” Tony asks, raising his voice. “They’d be _dead_ if it weren’t for the Avengers. Or Thanos’s fucking _slaves_. How the hell can they blame us for what happened, after we — ”

 

“I know, I know,” says Peter placatingly.

 

MJ is less sympathetic. “Keep your voice down,” she says, her voice steely.

 

“How could they possibly think that? And why didn’t you _say_ something?” Tony demands, the way MJ knew he would.

 

Peter visibly flinches. She knows that his silence has taken a lot more of a toll than he ever lets on. He’s had to stand by for the last five years and let the names of his friends, his heroes, get dragged through the mud; let his own name become synonymous with failure.

 

“People think the Avengers drew attention to Earth, given … everything that happened in the years before Thanos,” says Peter. “They don’t — they don’t know any better. They needed someone to blame.”

 

“And you let them.”

 

“No, he saved them,” MJ snaps. He doesn’t get to talk to Peter like this. Not after everything Peter has done. Taken on the burden of his company, of cleaning up his mess, of _raising_ his — 

 

“It wasn’t safe, outing myself,” says Peter. “Maybe it would have been one thing if I’d been the only one to worry about. But … there were things — people — I couldn’t compromise. You have to understand.”

 

MJ doesn’t think he does. Tony’s lips are set in a grim line, his dark eyes hard and unyielding.

 

“Trust me, Tony,” she says, “there were a hell of a lot more things to worry about with the _living_ before we worried about whether or not dead people got their due.”

 

Peter hangs his head, then, and MJ instantly regrets her choice of words. The brunt of it was meant to knock Tony out of whatever self-absorbed rant she sensed coming on; was meant to stop it before he said something he’d regret, something that would hurt Peter.

 

Turns out MJ managed to do that just fine without Tony’s help.

 

The quiet in the room is so heavy that MJ feels like she is going to sink under the weight of it. She wants to reach out, wants to grab Peter’s hand or ease herself into him, wants to absorb some of the pain she just accidentally caused. But whatever is happening here feels separate from her; like for the first time since they all walked in here, it’s not Peter and MJ with Tony, but for a brief moment, Peter and Tony with her.

 

Peter sucks in a breath that hitches just slightly enough that there is no pretending it didn’t happen. He shakes his head, embarrassed, and says, “I really am sorry, Tony.”

 

“Jesus, kid,” says Tony. Nobody faults him for the old nickname this time. “Don’t — don’t apologize. I’m the one who’s …”

 

Peter clears his throat, and MJ watches as he resettles his face, as he slips back into self he puts on for the world before he walks out the front door. For once, it’s Tony who takes longer than everyone in the room to recover.

 

“I’ve gotta, uh,” says Peter, blinking hard. “I’ve got to pick up James.”

 

MJ has a hundred thousand things to do right now — a hundred thousand she’s already missed that she needs to have done earlier today — but she doesn’t move, asking, “Do you want me to go get him?”

 

“No, no, I … I will.”

 

“Right,” says Tony, standing abruptly. “I’ll, uh …”

 

“You don’t have to go,” says Peter. “You can — where are you staying?”

 

“I have an apartment, it’s all … taken care of,” says Tony. “Here, I’ll — I’ll leave you the address and the phone number they gave me.”

 

“Right,” says Peter, rising from his chair too, a little more unsteadily than usual.

 

MJ grabs him a pen and paper to write it down, and there is something unbearably awkward in the seconds it takes for him to do it. What are they supposed to do here? Invite him to dinner? Tell him that they’ll stay in touch?

 

Tell him about his son?

 

She can see the same fear, wary in Peter’s eyes. But she can also see something else; see that old insecurity, that old skittishness. It almost breaks her heart, for the brief few moments Peter seems to hover in Tony’s orbit — like she could blink her way back to five years ago, when Peter’s eyes were wide and rapt and earnest, hanging on Tony’s every word. When Peter was so constantly lingering on some edge of his own design, waiting for Tony’s approval, gutted if he didn’t get it.

 

James will never look at either of them that way. James will never have to wonder. They’ve made damn sure of that.

 

Before MJ can let herself justify any more of her bitterness toward Tony Stark, though, she watches as he puts down the pen and looks at Peter, watches as something so subtle but so cutting shifts in his expression — watches as he suddenly pulls Peter into a hug so fierce that it threatens to topple him. Watches as Peter freezes for a moment, stunned, and then wraps his arms around Tony’s, and closes his eyes like he hasn’t even let himself blink for the last five years, and for the first time he finally trusts the world to still be there when he opens them.

 

“Thank god it was you,” says Tony, without letting Peter go. “If anyone got to live — if anyone had to be here — I’m so fucking glad it was you.”

 

* * *

 

That night James falls asleep with his cheek pressed to his book in the middle of their bed. He has a bed of his own that he sleeps in, of course, but an hour passes and MJ pries the book out from under his head and nobody has the heart to move him. They end up settling on either side of him, blinking at each other in the darkness, the same thought rattling back and forth between them.

 

“Peter,” she finally says.

 

She can count the number of times she has seen Peter cry on one hand. For a moment, when his eyes sweep up to meet hers, she is afraid she may count one more.

 

“I can’t,” he says. His eyes are swimming in the dim light, but he glances at James sound asleep between them and manages to hold it together. She wishes they lived in a world where they both didn’t feel like they had to. “I can’t do it, MJ.”

 

MJ presses her lips together. “I’m the last person on earth to defend Tony Stark,” she says after a moment. “But …” The words are burn on the roof of her mouth like poison. Like they could suffocate her if she let them. “He deserves to know.”

 

Peter closes his eyes, then, and shifts forward just enough to press his forehead to hers. She closes hers too, breathing him in. Breathing in this moment. Breathing in the _MJandPeterandJames_ , the way it is, the way it always has been and the way she always assumed it would be.

 

It takes a long time, but eventually Peter’s breathing evens out; eventually, in a rare moment, he seems to be actually and fully asleep. MJ lays there with a loneliness she hasn’t felt in years until the sun rises, until James stretches awake and knocks his little knee into her hip, until half a dozen pings go off on her phone and Peter’s all at once and he jerks his eyes open and they both roll over to look at the notifications on their screens.

 

 _Tony Stark Alive After Battle With Thanos, Releases Statement To Public_  

 

MJ and Peter’s eyes meet each other’s at the same time. She looks at him, and then back at the notification and the already mounting missed calls on her phone.

 

“Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise we'll see more of James and Tony in the next chapter ... just had to lay some groundwork for ~conflict~. Nothing is ever easy for my emotionally stunted faves. (MWAHAHAHA.) 
> 
> Thank you guys so much for reading, and for your reviews — I had many human things to do this weekend but I was so pumped by the response I just was like, eh, screw responsibility, LET'S WRITE FIC INSTEAD. (Please put those last seven words on my headstone.) 
> 
> As always, feel free to hit me up at upcamethesun.tumblr.com! (But know that it is a side blog, and for some reason it won't let me follow back from it, which, rude.)


	4. Chapter 4

Peter is dying.

 

He’s known it for a long time now; knew it before he finally saw a doctor, at MJ’s request and eventual demand. He knew it the first time his heart seized in his chest a few months after the war, quivering like something that didn’t know how to be inside of him, pushing the air from his lungs. He’s known it a little more each time it’s happened since, and it goes on a little longer, gets a little harder to shake off.

 

The doctor was baffled, but Peter wasn’t. The government received a message a few years back from off planet that nobody else was able to encrypt. Peter still had the translation device Big Peter had given him during the war; was still in the careful process of pulling it apart to figure out how to produce more of them. He put it back into one piece, fed it into his ear, and was unsurprised to find that the message was for him.

 

It was from Big Peter. Apparently, he said, the soil of the planet where the last battle had taken place was toxic to anyone who didn’t originate from it; his team had been affected, and he was guessing Peter was, too. He said not to worry. He said they had a cure, and they were coming for him.

 

That was three years ago. Peter hasn’t received a single transmission from the Guardians since.

 

He didn’t tell MJ about the poison, but he couldn’t very well hide the effects of it from her. The hallucinations. The wounds that never fully healed. The actual, literal heart attacks, that he knows he only manages to survive because of what little is left of his healing factor.

 

One day it isn’t going to be enough.

 

So Peter has been making plans. He quietly wrote up a will. He put what little money he could save for MJ and James away. He started, a few times, to write letters to them both, but then he imagined them actually _reading_ them — imagined a world where he wouldn’t be here, the way his own parents weren’t. The way his uncle and then his aunt weren’t. Imagines the grief in his aunt’s eyes in those years after Ben died. And he just couldn’t do it.

 

He hates himself for it. Hates that he’s going to betray them. Hates that he’s going to leave a hole in James’s life, that he’s going to break the only promise he ever made —  _I’m always gonna be here,_ he’d told him, _I will never,_ ever _leave you alone_ — and there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it.

 

On his darker days — when his heart is twinging, on the verge of another episode, and his leg is aching so much it feels like it has its own pulse — Peter is certain that he deserves this. That this is his penance, for surviving the war when everyone else did not. Maybe he’ll live another year, maybe he’ll live another ten, but he’ll live them all in an agony that steadily gets worse by the day. It’s only right. It’s only fair. In fact, it’s almost comforting, how the world distributed this particular brand of karma; how there almost seems to be an order to it. Like in all the chaos, the universe still remembered the fate Peter Parker deserved.

 

The balance of that particular rationale, though, flies out the window the moment Tony Stark came back into their lives. The moment they wake up to the headline that has the power to undermine everything they’d built in one fell swoop.

 

 _Tony Stark Alive After Battle With Thanos, Releases Statement To Public_  

 

“Shit.”

 

“Mimi,” says James, “you’re not supposed to say ‘shit’.”

 

“Neither are you, squirt,” says Peter, recovering faster than MJ does. MJ is already dialing out on her phone, no doubt to President Ramirez. Peter blinks the last of the sleep out of his eyes, wondering if he’s dreaming, about to go fumble into the kitchen to find the piece of paper Tony left his phone number on.

 

“But what’re you saying ‘shit’ about?” asks James innocently, bounding up in bed and following Peter.

 

“Strike two,” Peter mutters, but _shit_ . His heart is pounding in his chest. What the _fuck_ was Tony thinking? Why didn’t he talk to them before he did this? Does he not understand the consequences of — 

 

No. No, he doesn’t. Because Peter hasn’t told him.

 

He glances down at James, whose eyes have gotten a little wide at Peter, picking up on the undercurrent of panic. Peter takes a breath, trying to slow the pace of his heart, crouching down to James’s level.

 

“Nothing, just boring work stuff,” says Peter. He reaches up and brushes some of James’s unruly curls down, willing his chest not to ache, willing himself not to let his worry bloom. There’s so much he wants to tell James right now, if it wouldn’t so immediately scare him: _I love you. I’m not going to let anything come between us. You’re safe here, always_.

 

But Peter isn’t sure if any of that is true anymore.

 

“Here,” says Peter, handing James the book he was reading last night. “Want some orange juice?”

 

“Yup.”

 

Peter’s hand is shaking when he pours it. It’s only a matter of time. People will ask Tony why he put Peter Parker in charge of Stark Industries, and Tony will spin the same story about him being a promising intern or whatever bullshit comes to mind, but it won’t stick. Someone will dig. Someone will trace it back, and match up the dates and the circumstances, and add it all up to Spider-Man.

 

And their world will explode. Peter will be discredited. Called a liar. MJ and James will be put in jeopardy, and the world will feel the ripple of its first real scandal since it started to get back up on its feet.

 

The worst part is, Peter was going to tell him about James. He _was_ . Not yesterday, when they were reeling from the shock of it, when he couldn’t say anything yet because who in their right mind _would?_

 

But this — is this too much? If Tony’s going to be this immediately reckless, if he’s not even going to try to understand the parameters of this new world before testing every goddamn edge of it —  his son is not going to get caught in Tony’s self-inflicted crossfire.

 

The next thought feels like a betrayal, but Peter can’t deny the truth of it: Tony doesn’t exactly have the best track record with keeping kids safe.

 

He pauses for a moment, halfway through dialing Tony’s number. That’s not fair. It wasn’t Tony’s fault. Peter was … well. As stubborn as he’s ever been. The only two times Tony ever asked anything of him were Germany and Thanos; the first Tony regretted, and the second they both knew was so unavoidable that it transcended inconsequential things like how old Peter was or whether or not any of them were “ready”.

 

“Hey, Peter.”

 

Peter blinks, wondering how Tony knows it’s him. It’s almost crippling, the strange comfort of it — of hearing Tony’s voice on the other end of the phone, as self-assured and cocky as ever. It makes Peter hate himself a little bit, feeling that same tug he felt as a kid, that same relief: _Tony’s here. Everything’s going to be fine_.

 

But it wasn’t. It isn’t. Peter wrestles himself back into the present, trying to focus.

 

“That was really stupid,” he blurts. “You should have waited to — ”

 

“I think we both know patience isn’t exactly my strong suit.”

 

Of course it isn’t. It’s _Peter_ who waits. _Peter_ who has been around to weigh the consequences. He pinches his nose between his fingers; it strikes him unexpectedly, how five years ago, it was a face Tony might have made addressing Peter.

 

“Are they — has anyone … are you okay?” Peter asks.  

 

Tony’s voice is a little less combative, a little more gruff: “Kid, I can take care of myself.”

 

“I know, but … it’s different now. Everything is — just — ”

 

“Is that Tony? Are you on the phone with him right now?” asks MJ, who is, understandably, livid.

 

“Ah. Your wife sounds displeased.”

 

It’s entirely inappropriate, how badly in that moment Peter wants to laugh. “Uh, a little,” he says, without bothering to correct him.  

 

MJ holds her hand out for the phone and Peter gives it to her, because, well, MJ.

 

“What the f— ” She turns and sees James watching attentively, with the slightest beginning of a smirk on his face. “ _Heck_ were you thinking, Stark?”

 

James’s ears perk at this. He’s heard the name “Stark” before. The rest of the world may hate the Avengers, but to James, they’re a bedtime story; through James, Peter has been able, in the barest of ways, to keep their real memory alive.

 

MJ heads into the bedroom to chew Tony out, and James immediately pounces, his book cast aside: “Does she mean Stark like Tony Stark? Like Iron Man?”

 

Peter doesn’t like to lie to James, if he can avoid it. “Yeah,” he says, after a moment. It’s not like James won’t find out about it at school anyway.

 

“He’s _real?_ ” James demands, his voice about an octave higher than usual. “You _know_ him?”

 

Peter presses his lips together. Everything about raising James has been learn-as-you-go — there were literally no guide books. Literally nothing to have prepared him for this, aside from Pepper’s notes and the ridiculous, swelling, incomprehensible love he has had for James since day one. Peter’s gotten better at a lot of the tough stuff; with MJ, it was easier than he imagined it would be. They decide what and how to tell him about the world together. They decide when he is ready to hear it. They’re a team, and because of it, James is who he is today: innocent, but not sheltered. Aware, but not burdened. They’ve been so, so careful to preserve an actual _childhood_ for him while still trying to prepare him for the world, and Peter could not be more proud of the result.

 

But neither of them could have prepared for this.

 

Peter knows James will have to know the truth eventually. As stupid as Tony has been about this whole thing, he can’t deny the man that. James is his kid. James is his last tie to Pepper, the person he loved more than anyone in this world. James is …

 

 _My son_ , Peter thinks to himself, the words crushing over him like a wave. Never once in James’s life has Peter ever imagined that that might be compromised.

 

But Peter can’t be selfish. Not with this. MJ might think this is a nightmare, but Peter can’t help the relieved part of him that knows this is a miracle.

 

James will still have a father after Peter dies.

 

“He … he came back. From far away. We didn’t think he would,” says Peter.

 

James raises an eyebrow at him. Neither Peter or MJ can physically manage the expression; it’s one he learned all on his own, a constant reminder of who he really is, despite who raised him.

 

James’s scarily impressive bullshit meter, however, is about as Michelle Jones as it gets.

 

“And yeah,” says Peter. “Your Mimi and I … know him.”

 

“You never told me that,” says James. The words aren’t accusatory; just curious. He trusts them so much that it sometimes scares Peter a little bit. He doesn’t know if he deserves it.

 

“I didn’t think we’d ever see him again,” says Peter honestly, “but yeah, he’s … he’s real.”

 

“And so are all the other Avengers?”

 

Peter closes his eyes for a brief moment. “Um, yeah,” he says. “But — but we’re not going to see them here. They’re not … they’re far away, too.”

 

“Dad,” says James, his little forehead puckering. “How do _you_ know the Avengers?”

 

 _Because I was one_.

 

But even this feels like a lie. Peter wasn’t, really. Not in the ways that counted. Even during the war, he wasn’t at the core of the team, but always hovering on the edge of it. A mascot, at best. Entertainment, at worst. He’d made himself vital in the battle against Thanos in the end, of course, but he hadn’t been there for everything that came before; hadn’t been there when the Avengers became the _Avengers_. Hadn’t been there when the beginning of their history was made.

 

It feels wrong, to think of himself as one of them. Disrespectful. They already have too much diminishing their legacy; Peter doesn’t need to make it any worse.

 

“They were … friends of mine. When I was first starting out at my job,” says Peter.

 

James seems to accept this. He knows about the war, or at least the bare details of it; knows enough to know that Peter’s “job” with Parker Industries began before he was born. “Why is Mimi mad at Iron Man?”

 

“She’s not — mad,” says Peter, wincing as MJ’s voice pitches through the door. “She’s, uh …”

 

“Super mad,” says James.

 

“Worried,” says Peter. “About Iron Man. He’s back, and that made some people a little bit scared, because they weren’t expecting it.”

 

“But he’s a good guy?”

 

“Yes,” says Peter vehemently. “He is. He always has been. People are just — confused. They don’t like when things happen without them expecting it.”

 

“Mimi sure doesn’t.”

 

Peter cracks a smile. “Nah, you’re right. She doesn’t.”

 

“Here,” says MJ, who has stalked out of their bedroom so quietly that Peter jumps a bit at the sound of her voice. She hands Peter the phone.

 

“Uh, hey, it’s me again,” says Peter.

 

“My eardrums express their gratitude.”

 

“Listen, do you … who have you been in touch with?” Peter asks. “I mean, nobody’s like — tried to come after you or anything, right?”

 

“They’re upset, but I haven’t seen any pitchforks yet.” There’s a clear bitterness in Tony’s voice when he says, “Hopefully I’ll have a chance to explain the whole thing before anyone tries to set me on fire.”

 

Peter doesn’t even know what makes him ask it — habit, maybe. It’s like a reflex, something he can’t stop. “Do you need help?”

 

There’s a beat, and then, “No, kid, I got this one. You hung up your webs for a reason.”

 

It’s something Peter has never once looked back on since he got off of the ship that took him home. But even the sound of Tony’s voice, the simple fact of him existing, and Peter feels this old itch that he hasn’t felt in ages — like he wants to press his fingers against the wall and see if it will still hold him. Wants to unearth that corner of the closet where he left the formula for his web shooters. Wants to climb something, or run somewhere, or _fly_.

 

The idea is childish. Selfish, even. He dismisses it as fast as it comes. 

 

“I can still help as Peter Parker,” he says. He means to say it with the confidence of someone who has accomplished everything he has in the last five years; instead it feels pitiful, like he’s the same 15-year-old kid he once was, wondering if he really has anything worth offering.

 

“If you could put in a good word with … well, literally anyone, that’d be great,” says Tony. “And hey. I know this isn’t — ideal for you. But you know me. Never was one to believe in hiding.”

 

The guilt is like a cramp in his heart. “Yeah,” says Peter, his eyes fleeting to James. “Um — Tony, there’s something I need to talk to you about. I mean, a lot of things, but — ”

 

“Sorry, kid, you cut out for a second. It looks like I’ve got some incoming calls — ”

 

“There’s — there’s something I need to talk to you about,” Peter says, a little louder this time.

 

MJ’s eyes are sharp on his, but she doesn’t say anything to stop him.

 

“I’ll come by,” says Tony.

 

“Okay,” says Peter, “uh, when do you — ”

 

“I gotta go. I’ll call you back.”

 

“Oh,” says Peter, and then, to the dead air: “Right.”

 

Both James and MJ are watching him as he sets the phone; James, with unbridled curiosity, and MJ with a quiet kind of fury.

 

“MJ,” says Peter.

 

She lowers her head for a moment, and when she looks back up at him most of the anger is gone, replaced by something that scares Peter more: fear. Before Peter can say anything and before James can see it, she leans forward, grabs Peter’s face, and presses her lips to his in that fierce way she does; like a promise they can keep.

 

“Ew,” says James.

 

It’s enough to take some of the weight out of the moment, enough that MJ’s lips manage to quirk a bit despite what’s brewing in her eyes.

 

“I know you have to tell him,” says MJ. She says the words lightly, but Peter knows it’s only so James doesn’t pick up on the significance of them. “But that conversation’s gotta be just him and you.”

 

Peter hates how relieved he is to hear that. Not because he doesn’t want MJ involved — Jesus, she is James’s mom in everything but blood. But now, at least, when he tells Tony the other truth, he still has a little time before he has to tell MJ. However much time he has before …

 

“Right,” he says, nodding without breaking her gaze.

 

MJ doesn’t nod back, but swallows hard and turns down to look at James and says, “Give me a kiss, squirt, I’ll see you tonight.”

 

James plants one on her cheek and MJ ruffles his hair and Peter pretends not to notice the tear that is already streaking down her face by the time she turns toward the front door and walks away.

 

* * *

 

But Tony doesn’t come over. At least, not for a few days. He calls Peter that night, a bit chagrined, and tells him that he’s essentially being followed everywhere he goes; that people are having a hard time believing his defense of the Avengers, and that he’s even been threatened. Peter has as much security as he can spare protecting Tony within minutes of the call, but knows better than to tell Tony about it. Tony may have lost a lot of things after the battle with Thanos, but he hasn’t lost his pride.

 

MJ helps where she can, too. When Peter speaks out in Tony’s defense — as a former employee and mentee, of course — she stands by him and defends Tony, too. She’s the one who tells Peter that he needs to start making plans to change the hierarchy of Parker Industries to include Tony, before it inevitably comes up on its own. She’s the one who starts making room for him in places Peter hasn’t even thought of yet.

 

“I thought — I thought you were angry with him,” Peter says.

 

MJ snorts. “Furious,” she corrects him. She hikes her knees up to her chest on the couch, leveling him with one of those tender expressions that somehow, even after all this time, manage to ground him in a way that nothing else can. “But I also know … I’d have nothing without him.”

 

Peter settles down next to her on the couch; something is brewing in her, and the least he can do is be here when it lets itself out. 

 

“Think about it, Parker,” she says. “If he’d left you in New York during the war, you for sure would have bit it within the first week, self-sacrificing idiot that you are. But he kept you alive up in that shit storm up in space. Or he did his best.” Her eyes are shining now. “He gave that to me. And he … he gave us James. He didn’t mean to, but he did, and I — ”

 

“Hey,” says Peter, only interrupting because she’s starting to cry. She swipes at her eyes, resisting for just a beat as he wraps an arm around her shoulders before she leans into him and lets out a little gasp.

 

“Shit,” she says, trying to recover. “I just — I know things are going to change, and I …”

 

“Maybe — maybe it’ll be good,” says Peter. He can only say it because for the first time, he’s starting to believe it himself. “Maybe it’ll be … maybe it’ll be better.”

 

She buries her head into his arm, her tears soaking his sleeve. “Yeah,” she says gamely. “Maybe.”

 

* * *

 

Another few days pass.

 

“You’re kind of relieved, though, aren’t you?”

 

Peter sucks in a breath that he doesn’t let go, his eyes trailing toward the kitchen. And there she is — Natasha Romanoff, leaning against the fridge, her eyebrows raised at him and her arms crossed over her chest.

 

“I mean, the longer it takes for Tony to come by, the longer you can lie to him,” says Natasha. She cocks her head at him, but her eyes are aimed at James. “Right?”

 

Peter’s mouth is so dry that it takes him a moment to speak.

 

“Hey, buddy,” he says when he does.

 

James looks up from the page he was coloring.   


“Why don’t you, uh … ” Peter can hear some commotion out on the cul-de-sac; he looks and sees ones of the kids from James’s class outside on her bike. “Why don’t you go play outside with Annabelle for a bit?”

 

“Oh,” says James, perking up immediately. He drops his crayon and starts making for the door. “Okay.”

 

“Don’t — don’t forget your helmet,” says Peter faintly, trying not to shrink under Natasha’s gaze.

 

“Duh,” says James. “Even Iron Man wears a helmet.”

 

“Oof,” says Natasha, as the door slams behind him. “That’s gotta hurt, huh?”

 

“What are you doing here?” Peter asks, his hands already balled into fists.

 

“Eh, what are any of us ever doing here?” says Natasha. Now she’s eyeing a framed photograph he has hanging in the living room — one of the few pictures of the three of them together. They took it outside the school on James’s first day of kindergarten. “Cute kid. It’s a shame what’s going to happen to him.”  

 

“Stop it,” Peter mutters. It won’t work, of course, but he tries to do what he always does — stare at the floor. Say as little as possible. Wait for them to leave.

 

“Stop what?” says Natasha. “Stop Tony from making a spectacle of himself? From putting every eye in in the world back on him, and dragging James into it? I can’t do anything to stop it. That’s on you, Pete.”

 

Peter breathes in. Breathes out. “You’re not real.”

 

“Course I’m not. You let me die, remember?” asks this Natasha, who was never so cruel in life, who gives herself away with the malice of her words but somehow does nothing to lessen the impact of them. “This problem with Tony, though? That’s very, _very_ real.”

 

Peter doesn’t need the ghost of a dead teammate to tell him that. The longer Tony has avoided them, the more Peter has felt the doubt start to creep in under his skin. If the controversy surrounding Tony is already so dangerous that he doesn’t feel comfortable even coming near them, how the hell is a five-year-old kid supposed to factor into that?

 

“Oh, please. That’s not what you’re worried about.”

 

Aaaaand there’s Clint. He’s on the couch, with the same idle kind of cruelty in his posture.

 

“You know that Tony’s going to replace you in James’s life. You won’t be _Dad_ anymore,” says Clint, the word bitter on his tongue.

 

Peter shuts his eyes for a moment, knowing it’s no use. Talking to Clint is always the worst of all of them. Clint was the most reluctant to leave and the first to die; back when Peter was still naive enough to hope for things, he spent every moment in between rounds with Thanos’s armies hoping that word wouldn’t get back to Clint’s family before they were there to tell them in person.

 

Turns out, Clint’s family was dead before he was.

 

“And where does that pain go?” says Clint. “Nowhere. There’s nothing worse than losing a child.”

 

“I’m not _losing_ him,” Peter says through his teeth, taking the bait the way he always does.

 

Clint laughs. “What, you think Tony’s gonna _share_ him?”

 

Peter honestly doesn’t know what to think. How could he? But shit, this mean, hallucinated version of Clint has a point. Peter has only really let himself get so far as telling Tony. He hasn’t been able to anticipate how Tony might react — if he’ll be happy, or devastated, or something in between. If he’ll just let them leave things the way they are, or rip James out from under them like Peter knows he has every legal right to do.

 

“We all know Tony isn’t the sharing type,” says Natasha. “And once Tony finds out … you’ll be lucky if you ever get to see that kid again.”

 

Peter shakes his head. Why can’t he just keep his eyes closed? Why can’t he just _ignore_ them? Even covering his ears with his hands does nothing to muffle out their noise; God knows he’s tried.

 

“Tony wouldn’t … he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t just — just swoop in and _take_ him, he’s not that kind of — ”

 

“Oh, he wouldn’t?” asks Clint, with a smirk that stills him.

 

Natasha finishes the thought for him: “Maybe you want to take a look outside.”

 

Peter whips around, and there, in the backyard, is Tony Stark — talking to his son.

 

Just like that, Clint and Natasha are swallowed back up into the recesses of Peter’s mind; just like that, Peter can’t hear anything but the beat of his heart and the pitch of James’s laughter out on the sidewalk. Peter can still use his uncanny sense of hearing when he wants to, can even use it when he _doesn’t_ — like right now, when every word exchanged between James and Tony is clear as a bell.

 

“But how _fast_ can you go?” James is asking, steering his bike in lazy circles on the lawn.

 

“In the suit?” Tony’s asking. He has to keep turning to maintain any kind of eye contact with James, and looks a little bit absurd doing it, all dressed to the nines and pivoting on the grass. “Pretty freaking fast.”

 

“Faster than a plane?”

 

“Pfft,” says Tony, waving a hand. “I can fly circles around planes.”

 

“Faster than the speed of light?”

 

“... Okay, you got me. But maybe one day.”

 

“Where’s your suit now?”

 

“Good question, squirt,” says Tony, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Looks like I’m gonna have to make myself a new one.”

 

James’s face lights up. “My dad can help,” he offers.  

 

Tony laughs at this. “Yeah. He’s a smart ki — guy.” He shifts a little bit as James finally brings his bike to a halt and dismounts it. “How much did he tell you about me, your …. dad?”

 

“Everything!” James blurts. “Your super suits, all the bad guys you beat up, the big space fight … I can’t believe you’re here! You’re my favorite Avenger.”

 

Tony seems unabashedly pleased to hear this, but still says magnanimously, “Aw, come on. What about Spider-Man?”

 

James stops and squints up at Tony in confusion. “Who’s Spider-Man?”

 

Peter looks away, but not before he sees the expression on Tony’s face falter for just a moment.

 

“A hero,” says Tony, after a beat.

 

“I’ve never heard of him.”

 

“That’s too bad,” says Tony, his voice uncharacteristically low.  

 

“So what does he — ”

 

Peter turns, then, to grab the doorknob and swing the door open, unintentionally making both James and Tony startle.

 

“Hey,” says Peter. “I didn’t realize you — it’s good to see you,“ he amends. Because it is. It is, and it isn’t, and _fuck_ , he can’t do this.

 

“Dad, look! It’s Iron Man!”

 

“Uh, yeah, it is,” says Peter, casting a glance up the street. He doesn’t see any of their neighbors out, though. “You guys wanna … come inside, maybe?”

 

This is weird. Weird and uncomfortable and _good_ , in some strange, cathartic way, because it’s not like Peter hasn’t ever imagined the idea of Tony somehow meeting James, somehow understanding all the love and pride that he and MJ have for him and knowing that he was put in the right hands — that he and Pepper were right to trust him, even though everyone around them probably thought they were crazy.

 

But in that scenario, Peter was dead, and so was Tony. In that scenario it was some pseudo-afterlife, where there wasn’t any awkwardness over who should do or say what, because James was all grown up and none of the logistics of it mattered anymore.

 

“Hey, I didn’t catch your name, squirt.”

 

“James,” he chirps, taking a seat at the kitchen table.

 

Peter doesn’t miss Tony’s quizzical look. The thing is, Peter’s still too thrown off by the idea of Tony being here to look at him at _all_ that it takes him a moment to address it.

 

“Um — friend of the family,” says Peter, in some futile attempt to minimize the lies.

 

Okay, not lies. Stalls. Because he’s going to tell Tony, Natasha and Clint and Peter’s own reservations be damned. But he can’t tell him now. Not in front of James.

 

Peter hasn’t even considered how the _hell_ they’re going to tell James.

 

“Huh,” says Tony. He makes himself at home in that way he always does, grabbing the same chair he sat in last week when he first fell back out of the sky and into their lives again. He squares James with another look, and James is positively _beaming_. To be fair, though, he’s never been shy; Peter has often worried that James would cheerfully make friends with an axe murderer if given the chance.

 

“How old are you, kid?”

 

“Five,” says James, without missing a beat. “How old are you?”

 

“Old. But unlike some people,” says Tony, looking Peter up and down with that familiar half-judgmental, half-concerned look, “I wear it well.” He turns back to James and asks, “And when _exactly_ is your birthday?”

 

“He’s a Capricorn,” says Peter smoothly, hoping it will get Tony off the subject before he tries to do any more mental math.

 

Tony lowers his voice. “And _she’s_ a … ?”

 

Peter tilts his head in confusion, and then — 

 

Oh. _Oh_. Peter’s ears burn and then his whole face is on fire, in a way it hasn’t been in years. He thought he was physically past the point of ever being this embarrassed again, but how can he _not_ be? Tony is trying to ask who James’s mother is, because unlike the rest of the world, _Tony thinks that he knocked some girl up at fifteen._

 

Peter does the only thing he can and shakes his head. Tony’s eyes hit the table in a momentary, respectful kind of quiet.

 

“Well, shit,” says Tony, candidly. “Uh, shoot. I’m impressed. Looks like you … y’know. Are raising a good egg.”

 

Peter’s voice is thick — with guilt, with pride, with the weight of the secret he still has to tell. “Thanks.”

 

“Really would have thrown those _Teen Dad_ or whatever shows on MTV a run for their money. Probably would have canceled you. No drama. Too much of your shit together.”

 

“Why does everyone keep saying ‘shit’ this week?” James asks.

 

“That privilege has _not_ been extended to you,” Peter reminds him, as Tony unhelpfully snorts.

 

Tony continues to grill James, who seems delighted by the attention, alternately balking at Tony and looking back at Peter with an endearing _Can you believe it?_ kind of expression that Peter acknowledges, with some embarrassment, must have been smacked all over his face when he first was pulled into Tony's orbit, too.

 

And the truth is, it’s never really gone away. The “somewhat misguided hero worship,” as MJ used to call it, before she went through all of Tony’s seemingly infinite files and plans and decided that the hero worship wasn’t so misguided after all. The truth is, Peter still finds himself stupidly hanging on Tony’s every word, watching a little too closely as Tony asks wry questions and James babbles his answers, holding his breath and hoping absurd hopes. _Please like each other. Please don’t be disappointed with the kid that I raised._

 

They do, and Tony does. In fact, it’s the most unburdened Tony has seemed since he first showed up. Peter feels the relief loosening in his bones, warm in his skin — this could work. This could be _okay_. He’ll tell Tony, and they’ll find some way to tell James, and they’ll all stick together. And someday, when Peter is out of the picture — when Peter breaks his promise, the all important one, and whatever this poison is finally does him in — at least there will be the comfort of knowing that Tony and MJ are both still here. James will never be alone.

 

Peter is so focused on his thoughts that he doesn’t notice Tony addressing him; doesn’t even realize the conversation has shifted until he is suddenly looking into Tony’s wary, worried eyes.

 

“Huh?” Peter asks.

 

“I was asking if you and the wife and kid wanted to grab dinner tomorrow,” says Tony, who must have figured out where the handful of functional restaurants in town are.

 

“Oh,” says Peter, “uh — yeah, I’ll have to check with MJ, but yeah, I’m sure we can …”

 

And then something strange happens. Something that Peter should understand, but he doesn’t. The back of his neck seems to _hum_ for a moment, drowning out even his own voice. He blinks, and then it feels suddenly cold in the room, like the hairs on his arms are — 

 

“Kid?”

 

Peter doesn’t answer him, at least not verbally. Peter grabs James, throwing an arm around his chest and scooping him up while simultaneously using his leg to kick Tony’s chair out from under him so he hits the floor. He has James firmly in his grasp and has leapt to the ceiling by the time the back wall of the house splinters from the onslaught of blaster fire in the exact spot where they’d been sitting milliseconds before, and Peter sees a sight he thought he’d only ever see again in his nightmares.

 

He watches Tony’s hand flinch, watches him reach for a trigger for his Iron Man suit that isn’t there. _Fuck_. Peter’s on his own.

 

At least he knows his abilities work, by merit of still being stuck to the ceiling with James, whose lungs are already filling with air that Peter has no doubt is about to turn into a full-fledged, well-earned scream.

 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” says the purple, translucent being armed with the blaster, and he steps into the hole he’s put into their wall and levels with Tony. His eyes drag up to the ceiling, where he sees Peter and registers an eerie, almost instantaneous recognition. “I thought only one of the monsters who destroyed my home were here. Now I see there are _two_.”

 

Peter only understands him because he implanted the translation chip that Big Peter gave him into his neck, after he managed to make his own prototypes and recreate it. James is screaming and Tony is gaping in shock.

 

But of course, Tony knows exactly what this being is; he knows better than Peter because he was just walking among them. Whoever this grudge holder is, he’s a being native to the planet that got ripped to shreds in the final battle with Thanos. Peter supposes that in his shoes, he’d be looking for someone to blame, too.  

 

“You murdered my family,” says the being to Tony. “Now I’ll take yours, too.”

 

“Okay, that garble sounded very threatening,” says Tony. It’s painfully clear that he’s trying to pull the being’s attention to him and away from Peter and James, and the air seems to stall in Peter’s lungs. Five years ago he wouldn’t have let it happen. Five years ago he would have pissed the hell out of Tony and distracted the threat right back.

 

Five years ago he didn’t have James.

 

Tony clears his throat. “Let’s all just — ”

 

More blaster fire. Peter doesn’t think, just acts; he throws James onto the well-padded couch and throws himself into Tony’s path, the blaster fire hitting him square in the shoulder and the leg.

 

“ _Peter_ — ” Tony yells, but that’s all that Peter even registers before blinks and opens his eyes into his sixteen-year-old self — instinct and invincibility, speed and calculation. He doesn’t feel pain, doesn’t feel fear, just feels that old primal urgency the way he used to feel in combat as a kid — 

 

 _— As a kid?_ some thought swarms in the back of his mind, _you_ are _a kid_ — 

 

And when Peter finally snaps out of it, the blaster is out of the alien’s hands, their attacker unconscious on his floor, and Peter is heaving, breathless, and bleeding in the middle of his living room, listening to _beatbeatbeat_ of James’s and Tony’s hearts in conflicting, too fast time.

 

“Peter,” Tony manages, after a moment. Peter can already feel the weight of Tony’s eyes on him, trying to assess the damage — can feel it so viscerally that it’s like being in those last few battles with Thanos and his armies all over again. “ _Kid_.”

 

It’s James who manages, in his squeaky little voice, to succinctly sum up the situation in one word: “Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by insomnia induced by 
> 
> 1\. the LITERAL MANIAC who kept buzzing my apartment door in the middle of the night and refused to answer me when I was like "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???" on the intercom (I accidentally posted about it on upcamethesun instead of my regular Tumblr — #bless y'all who responded, your girl eventually did call the police and apparently the mere threat of that scared whoever it was off), and 
> 
> 2\. the punks who are currently blasting "Hotel California" in the courtyard with no respect for the fact that I am a millennial grandma and need to be asleep yesterday. 
> 
> I mean, I live in NYC, it's a miracle if anyone sleeps at all. BUT STILL. 
> 
> Good night, friends, and #bless you for your reviews and comments. May we all get some glorious slumbers this weekend (and maybe an Infinity War trailer before we all get SWALLOWED BY THE SUN).


	5. Chapter 5

There is a tiny human staring at Tony with terrified eyes that are rounder than moons, and it’s all Tony’s fault.

 

“That thing shot my dad.”

 

“Your … dad’s gonna be fine,” says Tony. Even though it might be a lie. Even though calling Peter anyone’s _dad_ feels so strange that his tongue feels like it’s sticking to the roof of his mouth whenever he says it.

 

“How do _you_ know?”

 

Tony glances toward the bathroom, where the door is strategically just open enough that Tony can see that Peter is moving on the other side of it, but James can’t see any of the blood no doubt staining every surface of the room.

 

“Is he — is he dead?”

 

For a moment Tony panics and thinks James —  _James_ , the odd name choice Tony can’t help but flip over and over in his mind, like it refuses to settle into the rest of a puzzle picture — is talking about Peter. But then Tony follows the big scared eyes to the floor and sees that James is very much referring to the unconscious alien strewn in a heap on the carpet.

 

Tony’s already on high alert; the moment he hears another clamor he grabs for James, who has probably been roughhoused more in the last two minutes than his whole hopefully uneventful life.

 

Peter ducks his head out too, his shirt and his pant leg streaming with red. But he looks entirely unfazed by the armed men who have stormed into the place, nodding at one of them.

 

“Everyone okay in here?”

 

“Yeah,” Peter lies seamlessly, slinking behind the door so they don’t have a view of his injuries. “We’re all — all good. Thank you for, uh …”

 

“What is this, your security detail?” says Tony, as they immediately set to work on the unconscious at their feet and start to secure some kind of perimeter around Tony and James.

 

“No,” answers one of the younger ones before Peter can. “We’re yours.”

 

Tony just blinks at him for a moment, and then it hits him — the kid’s been having him tailed. An hour ago he might have been angry, but an hour ago he hadn’t just compromised both Peter and a _literal fucking child_ just by existing in the same space as them.

 

“My dad stuck to the ceiling,” James says to himself.

 

“Yeah, uh, maybe we keep that one on the DL,” says Tony, his eyes tracking back to the bathroom.  

 

“You saw that, right?” James asks.

 

Right. Back to the tiny person they all just collectively scarred for life. Tony forces himself to focus on James, even though there is just something so weirdly _striking_  about him, even though there is some distant unease every time Tony looks at him that he can't begin to explain. “Yeah. It’s a whole thing and we’ll talk about it later, okay?”

 

“Okay,” says James, whose little kid brain seems to finally be catching up to everything that’s happening. He’s not quite crying, but making one of those quivering looks like he just might. Tony reaches out, a little hesitant at first, and musses his hair the way he watched Peter do it.

 

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” says Tony.

 

And there — that’s when it happens. That’s when the strange, uncanny whine in the back of Tony’s mind since the moment he laid eyes on James becomes a roar. James tilts his head at Tony, squaring him with an expression that Tony has seen a hundred thousand times; those same discerning eyes, that just slightly furrowed brow, that quiet, understated confidence that somehow can level him with one glance.

 

“It doesn’t _look_ fine,” says James.

 

But Tony isn’t even listening to him anymore. Tony is staring. Tony is outside of his own body, staring at himself while he stares at this — this — 

 

Freckled, messy-haired, scrawny-limbed _kid_ that is staring back at him with Pepper’s eyes.

 

“Dad?” James calls. Tony startles, but then he sees that James is calling into the bathroom for Peter.

 

“Out in just a second, buddy,” says Peter. “You stay with Mr. Stark.”

 

Tony’s heart is somewhere in his throat, pulsing all over body to some rhythm he can’t recognize.

 

 _Friend of the family_.

 

Rhodey was dead before Tony and the other Avengers even made it to Thanos.

 

 _He’s a Capricorn_.

 

They left Earth in June.

 

But that’s all inconsequential, just facts that are framing an image that’s been slowly taking shape in his mind since the moment he saw James burst out of the house on that very first night. That strange recognition, that ripple of _something_ that seemed to pass through him, that now feels like it’s slicing him like a knife.

 

The door opens again, and this time it’s Michelle who bursts in.

 

“James,” she breathes, running over and gathering him up into her arms in this fierce, terrified way that makes Tony’s heart clench. He’s paralyzed, staring uselessly until Michelle turns to him and says, “Where’s — ”

 

“Hey,” says Peter, emerging at the sound of her voice. He’s fully composed now, _too_ composed; Tony can only just see the faint outline of bandaging under his shirt, and Michelle must not see it at all, because she pulls him in and the three of them sink into the couch, clutching each other like an island, like something impenetrable.

 

No — like something fragile. Like something Tony nearly destroyed.

 

“Are you okay?” James asks, worried eyes on Peter.

 

“Yeah, buddy, I’m fine,” says Peter.

 

“Dad got shot,” says James.

 

“Tattle tale,” Peter ribs him, clearly trying to distract both James and Michelle from the still mounting panic. And _god_ , Tony remembers that routine — remembers all of Pepper’s indignant scoffs, her rolled eyes, the “Oh, Tony”s that inevitably were capped off with a kiss.

 

But it doesn’t work on Michelle, not by a longshot. She scans Peter up and down, worried but momentarily satisfied, before saying, “You scared the _crap_ out of me.”

 

Peter offers her a tired, slightly crooked smile, but Tony can see that his hands are shaking, can see that same distance in his eyes that he had in those last few weeks against Thanos. It’s a ghost that haunts Peter, but one that’s been chasing Tony since the moment he set foot in this place. He has no distance from it. There was then, and there is now, and never have those lost five years seemed more impossible or devastating than this moment.  

 

How the _hell_ did Tony not recognize his own _son?_

 

Tony is expecting Michelle to yell at him — hoping, even, so he can have an excuse to get out of here, because every thought in his head sounds like a _scream_ and he’s not quite sure if he’s breathing and in a moment people are going to start asking him questions he doesn’t give a fuck about the answers to. But Michelle murmurs something to Peter, and Peter nods after a quiet beat and says, “I’ll be there by tonight,” and then Michelle is pulling James into her arms and heading out the front door with the security detail as Tony watches stupidly like he’s stuck inside of some dream.

 

“You should come with us,” says Peter, rousing Tony out of his thoughts. Tony blinks and sees that they’re alone in the house now; it’s just him and Peter with his unsteady hands and patches of dark red already bleeding through his bandages. “It’s a safe location — well, safer, anyway.”

 

“No,” says Tony immediately, because what the _hell_ is Peter thinking? It’s Tony’s fault that thing found them. He didn’t listen. He didn’t _think_. And now — 

 

“Tony — ”

 

“That thing you wanted to tell me,” says Tony, his throat dry. “What was it?”

 

Time seems to finally slow back down then, as Peter stiffens and his eyes can’t quite meet Tony’s. There’s a beat where Tony thinks that maybe he imagined the whole thing. Maybe he really is just so disconnected, so devastated from the loss that he conflated this whole thing in his head, and he just spent the last five minutes reaching for air.

 

But then Peter exhales a shaky breath and takes the seat next to Tony on the couch.

 

“Tony,” he starts, and then abruptly shakes his head. “Wait, first — I … I’m sorry. I have to make something clear. Because none of this is fair, but I just — I just need you to know. To understand.”

 

His eyes are pleading; he is unrecognizable from the boy he once was, who once cut dizzying paths into an unfeeling city like he had nothing to lose. Now he looks so alternately burdened and still so _young_ that Tony has a hard time remembering the world they used to live in at all.

 

“James is my son,” says Peter. “I raised him. I love him. There has never been a single moment of my life that I would have had it any other way. He is more important to me than anything else in the world.”

 

It scares Tony, how steady the words are. How the truth of them is so fundamental and unshakable that they seem to hold Peter upright like bones.

 

“But James is …” Tony doesn’t mean to start saying it, because he can’t finish it. He looks to Peter, who is trying for the sake of them both to stay calm, even though it’s clear that he isn’t. He looks to Peter and wonders when the _hell_ the kid became the stronger of the two of them.

 

Peter says the words slowly, like they’re the hardest words he’s ever had to say: “James is your son.”

 

Tony closes his eyes for a moment, and tries to find some part of himself that can fathom it. It feels like it’s happening to someone else, to some other Tony — to some version of himself he once was, or some version he could have been. He has the sudden sense of reaching out for something he can’t touch, trying to reel something back in, trying to recognize himself in the aftermath of this.

 

It takes him a few seconds to realize he’s shaking his head. Not because he doesn’t believe it — because he’s not sure if he _wants_ to.

 

“Pepper and I — we — we left you with the _company_ ,” says Tony, not even sure why this is the first thread of logic he reaches for. There are too many questions racing through his head at once, maybe, and this is the easiest one to grab. Easier than imagining those big brown eyes and Pepper’s freckles and five long years of god only knows what he’s missed. “We would never have —  _burdened_ you with — ”

 

“James is not a burden,” says Peter. The words are immediate and defensive, almost tinged with an anger. “Maybe it wasn’t part of the original plan, but Pepper — she told me to take care of him. And I promised her I — ”

 

“Pepper _what?_ ” It feels like something is puncturing in him; like he’s losing her all over again. He doesn’t want to know it, but he has to: “Pepper was _alive?_ ”

 

All at once Peter’s eyes are wet, his expression pinched. Tony has to look away from him briefly or he’s going to lose himself, too.

 

“Yeah,” Peter says, “she was. Just long enough for me to find her, and — and give me James, and the plans for how to start fixing things. I’m sorry, Tony, I’m so sorry.”

 

Tony can’t seem to fill his lungs with the right amount of air. “How did she … why would she …”

 

“It was radiation poisoning. I’m sorry,” Peter keeps saying. “I found her right after the Guardians dropped me off. I really — I only had a few minutes with her before she … ”

 

“Left you with an _infant_.”

 

“She had notes — she left a lot of them. About James. And the company. And — I saved it, I have it on a file somewhere — she left a letter for you, in case you … in case you …”

 

Tony shakes his head, almost violently. _No_ . He doesn’t want a fucking letter. He doesn’t want to be the one who outlived her, doesn’t want to be the one who’s _here_ when in every fucking scenario he played out in his head by the end of the war, it was _Pepper_ who survived. _Pepper_  he fought for.

 

She must have known before he left. She would have been — what, three months along? _Did_ she know, then, or was she so distracted by everything happening that she missed it until it was too late to tell him anything at all?

 

He can’t let himself think about it, can’t let himself imagine that Pepper would let him just _leave_ without knowing what was waiting for him at home — let him leave her with the burden of raising their son alone.

 

But ultimately that burden didn’t fall on either of them, did it? It fell on a _kid_. A child, really. Peter may be sitting here with those haunted eyes and that weary posture far beyond his years, but he is still so ridiculously _young_. He could be the same sixteen-year-old he was to Tony a mere two weeks ago, when they were fighting an impossible war; the same sixteen-year-old he must have been when Pepper handed him a child, and the burden of the whole world to save to boot.  

 

“How much does James know?”

 

Peter flinches. “Nothing,” he says. “He thinks that I’m his dad, and that his mom is dead.” He mistakes Tony’s silence for something else, and says, in this tortured voice, “I — I didn’t mean to lie to him. I just spent my whole life with my aunt and uncle wondering if — if they really wanted me, or just felt like they had to do right by my parents, and I didn’t want James wondering that, not _ever_. If I’d had any idea that — that someday you’d be back, I swear to god, Tony, I would have — ”

 

“No, Jesus, kid — don’t — you don’t have to explain anything to me,” says Tony, hating himself a little bit more with every word that comes out of Peter’s mouth.  

 

“I told him about — well, you know I told him about Iron Man. And you. I made sure he knew you, and everything you did. I made sure he knew you were a hero.”

 

It hurts to hear. He doesn’t want to. He was touched, at first, at how James prattled on in wonder about Iron Man, about the Avengers — touched because he assumed that it was some extension of Peter’s own wonder. That maybe if Peter had spun all these tales about them to his son that there was still some of that patent Parker innocence that hadn’t been beaten out of him yet.

 

He should have realized it was the guilt of having outlived them all; should have realized the moment that little voice asked him who Spider-Man was. He should have realized because the weight of it crushes him just the same.

 

Tony doesn’t feel like a hero. Can’t even remember a time he ever felt like one at all.

 

He stands so abruptly that Peter startles. “I have to go.”

 

“Mi — Tony, wait.”

 

Fuck it all if that almost “Mr. Stark” isn’t the final crack that threatens to break him.

 

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he says, turning his back on Peter. “I put all of you in danger. It won’t happen again.”

 

“What? No, Tony, it was — we’ll figure out what the hell happened, and — and you can get to know James, and we’ll figure how to tell — ”

 

“We’re not going to tell him,” says Tony, reaching for the door, and blinking back the five years that just hit him from behind.

 

“We’re — what?”

 

The utter disbelief in the kid’s voice stalls him for a moment. Tony steels himself, swallowing it down — the poison of his grief, his regret, the self-loathing he has worn his whole life like a second skin that is now threatening to consume him.

 

“I can’t undo what we did to you, kid,” he says. “I failed you. And I’ll fail him, too.”

 

Peter’s eyes water like Tony just slapped him across the face. “No,” he says, “ _no_. You don’t get to do that. You — you did everything you could for me. I wouldn’t even _be_ here if it weren’t for you, and I wouldn’t have James, and he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

 

“I’m sorry,” is all Tony can say, because he doesn’t want to fight him on this. He can’t.

 

He opens the door, but the kid is right behind him; a hand wraps around his elbow and holds him there.

 

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” says Peter.

 

Tony can sense the kid willing him to look over at him, but he doesn’t. “Let go.”

 

“It’s important,” says Peter, and Tony can tell by the way that his voice cracks that it’s not just important, but it’s terrible. That it’s going to be more than Tony can bear.

 

“I need to — I just have to — ”  

 

“Tony, _please_.”

 

Tony pulls his arm out of Peter’s grasp, nearly stumbling onto the front steps. He doesn’t hear the door close behind him, which is how he knows that Peter is watching him go, watching every deliberate, horrible step that Tony takes away from him and their little house and the little family that Tony swears to himself he will never come near again.

 

 

* * *

 

He goes back to the dimly lit, sparse apartment, but not before stopping in the one liquor store he can find in this barely constructed city. He drinks himself stupid. He sits on the floor and watches the door and in some selfish, stupid way hopes that the attackers will come for him again and finish him off. The thought is unhelpful and intrusive and he knows, deep down in his heart, that he doesn’t mean it, but he wants some end to this misery — this _turmoil_ of knowing everything he is responsible for, everything he’s missed.

 

At some point he passes out — that was the point, wasn’t it? — but even then, can’t find any reprieve.

 

He’s dreaming, but it’s a memory, really. He’s back on the ship, orbiting one of the planets they suspected one of the Infinity Stones was hidden in — there are people on the ground looking for it, and the Avengers and the Guardians up the in the sky, eyes peeled for Thanos. It’s about three months into their expedition, and also the unfortunate moment about half of them succumb to some kind of space virus that, at the very least, happens in the few days they aren’t urgently needed for anything.

 

Tony doesn’t catch it, but Peter does. Not that anyone knows for a few days, because Peter is an infuriatingly good liar when it comes to his own well-being; only after he collapses in a heap in the middle of a rousing conversation with Gamora about the possible abuses of the reality stone does anyone realize that he, too, has been incapacitated.

 

Mantis pulls Peter into the room where the others are recuperating and assures Tony that he’ll be fine after a few days, but the kid looks anything but _fine_. There’s a sheen of sweat on his brow, and his face is twisted in a near constant frown, like he is perpetually dreaming of some place he doesn’t want to be. Tony spends approximately half of his time irritating Mantis and the other half at Peter’s bedside, long enough to hear him mumbling in his sleep, long enough to hear the hours upon hours of nightmares that seem to plague him as they wait for the fever to break.

 

At some point Peter starts shuddering in his sleep, and for the first time saying words so audible that there is no mistaking them: “Uncle Ben,” he gasps out, “no, please … Uncle _Ben_ …”

 

And Tony is frozen. Sitting at Peter’s bedside, watching the misery contort his fevered face, at a loss for what to do.

 

“I’m sorry …” Peter is gasping now, his eyes so active under his eyelids that Tony can see them shifting, can feel the panic in them as if it’s his own. Tony puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder and tries, for a few moments, to rouse him, even though Mantis warned him not to do just that. “I’m s-so sorry, oh god … it’s — m-my fault, all my fault … I … “

 

Tony doesn’t know what else to do except keep his hand on the kid’s shoulder. Peter’s gasps devolve into hiccuping sobs, and Tony feels the guilt eating at him — it’s his fault the kid is here, that he’s sick and reliving whatever nightmare is playing out behind his eyelids right now, and there’s _nothing_ Tony can do.

  
“You’re okay, kid,” Tony manages. It feels insufficient and hopeless, but he tries. “It’s not your fault. It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

 

And then, by some miracle, the kid seems to shrink back into himself. The murmurs quiet and his breathing evens out and Tony watches him sink back into his delirious, unwakeable slumber.

 

“He’s an orphan too, huh?”

 

Tony startles at the sound of Quill’s voice behind him; he hadn’t noticed him approaching, but of course he’d be here. Tony’s not the only one with someone he cares about in this ward.

 

“Yeah,” says Tony.

 

“Woo, sad orphan club.”

 

Tony pinches his eyes shut. “At least our dads aren’t actively trying to commit intergalactic genocide and take over the universe,” he says, alternately referring to Thanos and deflecting.  

 

To his surprise, Quill snorts. “Funny story …”

 

Peter’s eyebrows start to furrow again in his sleep, and Tony says, “Yeah, maybe some other time.”

 

Quill nods from behind him, and then says, “Well. He’s lucky to have you.”

 

Tony bristles, not willing to look Quill in the eye.

 

“I had a … I had someone in my corner, after the whole parents thing went to shit. And it meant everything to me. Still does.”

 

Tony doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even nod. At some point Quill leaves the room, and Peter falls back into his deep, fevered sleep, and Tony — 

 

And Tony wakes up. Tony wakes up five years in the future, to a tiny, stale apartment and a dry mouth and a pounding, excruciating, well-deserved headache pulsing between his ears. He blearily opens his eyes, seeing the half-empty liquor bottle propped up against the wall beside him, feeling the heat o f specific kind of shame he hasn’t felt in years.

 

He’s unsteady on his feet, already trying to backtrack, trying to parse through the unsteady memories and the things he wouldn’t let himself feel. Then he realizes why he woke up in the first place — it’s his phone, buzzing on the desk. He reaches for it and sees that it’s the fourth call made in the last hour, and his heart is already in his throat.

 

“Hello?”

 

Michelle’s voice is as blunt as ever: “Is Peter with you?”

 

“No,” he says. “Isn’t he supposed to be with _you?_ ”

 

“Yes,” she answers, her voice like a whip, “but he isn’t, and he’s not picking up his phone. I’m not allowed to leave until we get a transmission to the Interplanetary Security Counsel. Where the _hell_ are you if you’re not with Peter?”

 

Tony doesn’t even have the heart to answer that. “I’ll — I’ll get him for you,” he says, hanging up before either of them can dissect the absurdity of it.  

 

Peter once told Tony, a little sheepishly, that sometimes he could sense danger. (“If this is leading into a ‘my middle name is danger’ joke, I will show you the door right now,” Tony had said at the time, because back then there was _room_ to rib his teammates and not worry that it was the last thing he’d ever say to them.) After Tony had finished teasing him, he and Bruce had taken the kid to the lab and tested it out — sure enough, every time Natasha had poised to throw a knife at him (so their methods weren’t the soundest), the biology of the kid’s brain literally changed in anticipation of things that hadn’t even happened yet. It was uncanny. Unprecedented. Impossible.

 

At least it felt impossible at the time. Because now Tony is stumbling back up to his feet and so grimly aware of some distant _danger_ that he doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like; that mounting sense of dread, the hairs standing on end. He feels it. He already knows something is wrong.

 

And then the flood of possibilities hits him all at once: the thing that attacked them probably wasn’t working alone, and Tony just _left_ Peter there. Left him injured, at that. Sure, the kid’s insane reflexes were enough to fight off one attacker after five years out of the game, but any more than that and — 

 

Shit. _Shit_. Tony has no idea how that thing found them, but there’s no doubt in his mind that there are more coming. He knows better than anyone how vulnerable their planet is right now.

 

It only takes a few minutes to get back to the house, but the minutes seem to stretch and slide, like every step somehow is more tedious than the one before it. From a distance the whole place seems very still. The door is closed. The lights are still on. But Tony _knows_  something is wrong in that same way he always has, in the same way he has since the call came through early one morning and a stranger let him know, in no uncertain terms, that aside from his name he was alone in the world.

 

He has made and wasted so many families since then. So many people he tried to protect, and couldn’t; so many forces that were too far beyond his control.

 

But this wasn’t. Peter warned him. Everyone had. And Tony didn’t listen.

 

Tony doesn’t knock when he reaches the house, just opens the door to utter, eerie quiet.

 

“Pet — " he starts to call, and then: " _Peter_.”

 

The door shuts behind him on its own as Tony stumbles the few feet it takes for him to reach the wall just outside the bedroom door that Peter is propped up against, pale and slack and unmoving. One hand is propped against his chest; the other is still curled around his phone.

 

“Kid,” Tony says, crouching down to his level, bracing his shoulders and _shaking_ him before he can think the better of it — there’s blood staining the front of his shirt and his leg, but not that much of it, not enough to warrant whatever this is. Peter’s lips are blue, his skin like paper, his entire body limp and unresponsive and — 

 

Fuck. Is he even _breathing?_  

 

Tony watches his chest, waits for that telltale rise and fall.

 

“No,” says Tony, and it comes out wrong, like he’s yelling at the kid, but he _is_ . “You don’t get to go out like this. You just _don’t_.”

 

Peter doesn’t so much as flinch.

 

Tony shakes him again, senseless to the point of disbelief. He knows how to master his own panic, but not here, not in this world with its new rules and its new cruelties, its new surprises and its new fears. Peter slumps in Tony's grasp, and Tony eases him down to the carpet, pressing his fingers to the kid's neck. 

 

He can't find a heartbeat. 

 

_There’s something else I need to tell you._

 

"You've had a fucking  _building_ dropped on you," Tony says, starting compressions. "You've been hit by trucks. You've downed a  _plane_. You survived fucking  _Thanos_ ," he says, and he's yelling now, dizzy with a grief that doesn't even know how to touch him. "You do  _not_ get to go  _out like this_." 

 

He's already watched Peter die once. He can't do it again. 

 

_It's important._

 

It's too late. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO. I have had the most insane week of my LIFE. I meant to update days ago, but literally any chance I had was interrupted, but it's good, it's mostly good things, at least I hope it's good things, I'm having a good week but a busy week and lots of things are happening/maybe happening, I don't know, I'm trying not to get my hopes up or down or around town, but things are things and they just happen so much. 
> 
> ^^ This has been the inside of my brain for the last five days. 
> 
> ANYWAY. Thank you for sticking with me. The workload I've had on me was kind of unexpected and might not settle down for a bit, but I'll make sure this gets finished in good time. I'm so so so glad you guys are reading. Don't tell the other humans, but y'all are my favorites.


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